Yearly Archives: 2017

McLuhan reading Havelock’s Crucifixion

McLuhan referenced Eric Havelock’s Crucifixion of Intellectual Man1 in his 1954 speech to the Catholic Renascence Society, ‘Eliot and the Manichean Myth’:

Today many thoughtful people are torn between the claims of time and space, and speak even of The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man as he is mentally torn in these opposite directions.

From an unpublished review written in 1952 or 1953 it seems that McLuhan had read Havelock’s book immediately after it appeared. For the second half of Havelock’s book has his translation of Prometheus by Aeschylus and in the first part much discussion is given to Zeus in the play as an evil god. In ‘The Heart Of Darkness’, a review of Melville’s Quarrel With God (1952) by Lawrence Thompson, McLuhan observes:

The condition of men in this [split] world [of Melville] is that of a Prometheus betrayed by a devil-god.

  1. Published in 1950 in the UK and in 1951 in the US.

How it is

1952
the academic world suffers from excessive humility. It is characterized by the conviction that its thoughts and pursuits are as insignificant as the Chamber of Commerce would like to think. Accepting this evaluation of itself, the academic world cannot be bothered to assume social responsibility or to talk seriously about its own pursuits even to itself.1 Perhaps there would be fewer specialist meetings and conferences if men of letters were sufficiently expert in literature to be interested in modern physics. And physicists would want to know much more about letters if they were aware that poetic method was always at least a decade ahead of laboratory method
(Review of Auden: An Introductory Essay)

  1. See the similar sentiments expressed by Harold Innis in the mid 1930s as cited in Innis and McLuhan in 1936.

Human being: navigator between worlds

a new concept of the nature of thought (Is It Natural That One Medium Should Appropriate and Exploit Another?)1

In ‘The Implications of Cultural Uniformity’2 McLuhan offers the following:

William Empson has described the role of the semiconscious navigator between worlds, in his ‘Arachne’ [1928] which opens:

Twixt devil and deep sea, man hacks his caves;
Birth, death; one, many; what is true, and seems;
Earth’s vast hot iron, cold space’s empty waves:

King spider, walks the velvet roof of streams:
Must bird and fish, must god and beast avoid:
Dance, like nine angels, on pin-point extremes.

His gleaming bubble between void and void,
Tribe-membrane, that by mutual tension stands,
Earth’s surface film, is at a breath destroyed.3
 

Worlds” for McLuhan are structured by variable binary relations between the oral and the literate or the auditory and the visual or the ear and eye.4 This is an elementary5 structure that, as Empson says, by mutual tension stands“. All human experience and identity is grounded in this ear/eye structure:

every artifact of man mirrors the shift between these two modes (Global Village, x)6

The spectrum of these elementary forms stretches from an extreme emphasis on the eye at one end of its range to extreme emphasis on the ear at the other. All the degrees of reduced antagonism between the two are arrayed along the axis between these opposed poles. Starting from one end of the spectrum, the eye pole, say, “extreme” emphasis on it as against the ear gradually diminishes toward the centre of the range; at the centre the emphasis on both the eye and the ear is in balance, favoring neither one of the two; from the centre in the other direction, stress on the ear as against the eye gradually increases until it reaches its “extreme” emphasis at the other end. As Take Today has it: 

There are only two basic extreme forms of human organization. They have innumerable variants or “parti-colored” forms. The extreme forms are the (…) eye and ear… (22)

Another text from this same period in the early 1970s, ‘The Medieval Environment’7 from 1974, has this:

there are two great principles of organization present in Western culture, the acoustic and the visual, and (…) these principles have enlarged and reversed themselves at various time in the past 2500 years of Western development (…) the culture of the eye and [of] the ear, of the outer-directioned rational man, on one hand, and the inner-directed intuitive man, on the other hand, are antithetic and incompatible. The other possibility, of course, is that they may be (…) complementary [ie, at the centre of the range of their possible relations where the emphasis on both the eye and the ear is in balance, favoring neither one of the two relative to the other].8

In this same essay, McLuhan turns to the question of time as times in the work of Saussaure:

Structural linguists, following the lead of Ferdinand de Saussure, have divided the approaches of their studies into diachronic and synchronic modes. The diachronic approach is chronological or developmental or sequential, and is familiar to most students of Western history and language and institutions.  The synchronic approach on the other hand, regards each moment or each facet of any situation as inclusive of the full range of the matters studied.  Another way of putting it is to say that the diachronic approach adopts a visual point of view, while the synchronic method prefers the simultaneity of the acoustic method.9 If the diachronic offers a point of view and continuous, rational exposition, the synchronic tends toward insight and instant awareness of totalities. The visual faculty (…) offers a world of continuity and homogeneity (…) whereas the acoustic world (…) offers a world that is discontinuous and multi-locational…

On the one hand, McLuhan explicitly correlates the diachronic/synchronic relation with the eye/ear relation so that the “variants” of diachronic/synchronic emphasis, like those of eye/ear, may be taken to define the range or spectrum of possible worlds. But, on the other hand, the diachronic/synchronic relation has an additional application which is essential to the proposed analysis. Here, diachronic/synchronic is not isomorphic with the eye/ear as the “two basic extreme forms” of the spectrum of worlds, but with “antithetic”/”complementary” where “antithetic” names both “extreme” ends of the spectrum of forms (all the “innumerable variants” of eye versus ear and of ear versus eye) while “complementary” names the middle of that spectrum (where eye and ear are balanced). Now it is this middle (“Medieval”) or  “synchronic approach” to any situation which first and only gives access to the spectrum of world forms from which the structure of that situation derives:10

The synchronic approach on the other hand, regards each moment or each facet of any situation as inclusive of the full range of the matters studied (…) the synchronic tends toward insight and instant awareness of totalities.

Compare chemistry. It, too, “regards each moment or each facet of any situation as inclusive of the full range of the matters studied” (namely, Mendeleev’s table and its associated laws and properties defining the chemical field) and it is “multi-locational” in vertical perspective since chemistry sees through any and every physical sample to the structures and laws exemplified by it. Notably, it is essential to chemistry that (a) the samples it studies and (b) its principles do not merge on a single level, but remain “multi-leveled”, each forever different from the other and, in their different ways, each forever subject to further specification.11

Ordinary experience proceeds (or, at least, takes it that it proceeds) diachronically from moment to moment, continuous and unbroken. It is like the mariners’ ship in Poe’s story sailing on the surface of the sea. The synchronic cuts across this sailing12, like the Maelstrom, which operates to wrench the mariners’ vessel out of its horizontal bearing into a catastrophic vertical descent (where the mariner or “navigator” is exposed to other ‘vessels’ and to the question of which one to ‘ride’). The synchronic in its relation to the diachronic is therefore not only a mode of characterizing possible worlds (where the relations of the two are isomorphic with those of ear and eye); it is also the one and only way in which access to the spectrum of elementary forms is to be gained. To repeat:

The synchronic approach on the other hand, regards each moment or each facet of any situation as inclusive of the full range of the matters studied (…) the synchronic tends toward insight and instant awareness of totalities.

For McLuhan there is a synchronic gap (where the action is) in every moment of human experience (where each is necessarily structured by some eye/ear relation):

The resonant interval may be considered an invisible borderline between visual and acoustic space (Global Village, 4)13

It is in this “invisible” gap “between visual and acoustic space” — the “common sense” or “tactility” which both links and differentiates them14 — that a vertical motion is enacted through which the spectrum of elementary experiential forms are exposed and ‘marked’ (or ‘re-marked’) in some way. “Consciousness is also a multileveled event” (From Cliché to Archetype, 117) and in its synchronic aspect, perpetually cutting across its diachronic bearing, thismultileveled event” unfolds as the essential exposure to “the full range of the matters” at stake, namely, “worlds”. This exposure is what McLuhan repeatedly termed the drama of cognition“.

In this way, access to the array of possible worlds always has been gained in every presentmoment or each facet of any situation” — but this process is nearly always subject to blackout. The scientific investigation of ‘worlds’ therefore only does consciously what unconsciously takes place in every moment in the synchronic generation of experience. Hence “the link between the stages of apprehension [in every moment of all experience] and the creative process [of scientists and artists]”.15

What happens in this perpetual exposure is that certain possibilities along the spectrum of the formal possibilities (the “sensory ground rules”16) receive “emphasis” such that a kind of melody is constellated. Such a ‘melody’ played on the harmonium of the forms of worlds is identity (individual and social) as a “pattern” of experience. The great question is: if identity results from this synchronic process — who plays it?

McLuhan names the agent in this process — an agency that is human being — as “the semiconscious navigator between worlds”.17 These worlds, between which human being perpetually navigates, are the worlds of lived experience and the array of forms beneath it as its ground:

To say that we live mythically today while continuing to think conventionally may help to draw attention to the technological18 gap in our ordinary experience. (Environment As Programmed Happening)

Since this ‘mythical’ ground of forms is the range of possible worlds19, ‘here’, too, the human being is a “navigator between worlds”.

So it is that human being is always actively navigating “between worlds” in three different ‘time-spaces’ at once: the figured world of lived experience (which varies between macro-worlds like east and west and between micro-worlds like the different individualities of each one of us); the grounding spectrum of ‘worlds’ where the possibilities of world structure are constantly in the process of re-view and improvised activation; and the ano-kato vortex between these two such that the latter are encountered below and the former are generated above.

  1. In McLuhan Hot and Cool (1967).
  2. Published in Superculture: American Popular Culture and Europe, ed C.W.E. Bigsby, 1975, 43-56.
  3. Empson’s poem is discussed in New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) by F.R. Leavis. McLuhan was an enthusiastic Leavisite for more than a decade after encountering the man and his work at Cambridge. He mentions Leavis’ book in ‘Poetic and Rhetorical Exegesis’ (1944) as “assessing the precise changes in the poetic climate which have occurred in consequence of the impact of Yeats, Eliot, Hopkins, and Pound on our language”. Hugh Kenner wrote to Philip Marchand of the time in 1946 after he met McLuhan: “He pushed at me T.S. Eliot, who’d been the type of unintelligibility to my Toronto profs. And he had me read Richards’ Practical Criticism, Leavis’ New Bearings in English Poetry, and (eventually) the entire file of Scrutiny. He kept mentioning Wyndham Lewis, whom I’d never heard of, notwithstanding that for two years I’d lived half a mile away from him…. So many windows opened! (Hugh Kenner to Philip Marchand, March 18, 1987, cited in Marchand’s bio of McLuhan, 102). Empson was in Toronto and had dinner with McLuhan and Frye in 1973. This could have been the motivation behind McLuhan looking into Empson again and citing his poem in his 1975 essay. Further, McLuhan’s citation may be a hint of what first set him on his life’s work during his time in Cambridge from 1934 to 1936: Leavis, Eliot and the question of what is traditioncontinuity and — communication? “Tribe-membrane, that by mutual tension stands”…
  4. “All rational propositions can be reduced to binomial terms” (Is It Natural That One Medium Should Appropriate and Exploit Another? 1967).
  5. “Every medium is in some sense a universal” (Notes on the Media as Art Forms, 1954).
  6. In chemistry, to compare, every material sample “mirrors the shift between these two modes of the proton and electron. The Global Village reverts over and over again to the notion that the eye and ear in their formal sense exist only in relation and therefore must always be understood structurally: “Acoustic and visual space structures may be seen as incommensurable (…) yet, at the same time, as complementary — a foot, as it were, in both visual and acoustic space” (45); “In our desire to illumine the differences between visual and acoustic space, we have undoubtedly given a false impression: and that is that the normal brain, in its everyday functioning, cannot reconcile the apparently contradictory perceptions of both sides of the mind” (48).
  7. The full title of this essay is ‘The Medieval Environment’: Yesterday or Today?’. ‘Today’ points to the treatment of the synchronic in this essay as cited in this post above. It is because ‘the Medieval Environment’ is a present synchronic possibility that McLuhan observes as a hint to us now: “a time when such a process of using both the visual and the acoustic, the rational and the intuitive, in some sort of equilibrium, however shifting, such is the time we have learned to call the ‘Medieval Period’.” McLuhan considered modern art and science, if not his age itself, as deploying in such a “‘Medieval period”.
  8. See note 6 above.
  9. Re “the simultaneity of the acoustic method”, see ‘We need a new picture of knowledge’ (1963): “It is important to observe that the quality of the new ‘structural’, as opposed to the old lineal, sequential and mechanical, is the quality of the simultaneous. It is the simultaneous ‘field’ of multitudinous events in equipoise or interplay that constitutes the awareness of causality that is present in ecological and nuclear models of perception today. Our electric mode of shaping the new patterns of culture and information movement is not mechanical but biological.” Also McLuhan to Ralph Cohen regarding Saussure: “His celebrated distinction between ‘diachronic’ and ‘synchronic’ is quite basically the contrast between the world of the eye and the world of the ear, between sequential and simultaneous. La langue is natural, simultaneous, total and hidden, while la parole is obvious and conscious.” (July 11, 1974)
  10. The synchronic is both a formal world possibility and the realization of that possibility in the world of lived experience.  The difficult knot of communication implicated here lies in the fact that access to the former is obtained only through the latter, but awareness in the latter necessarily originates only in the former. As Eliot says in Four Quartets (Burnt Norton), the instigation of such awareness comes “before the beginning and after the end”.
  11. In Through the Vanishing Point McLuhan writes of “the world of space and time in the art of Chaucer (as) discontinuous and multileveled”, of “a multileveled exegesis” and “a multileveled approach” (all on 49); of the “multidimensional” and of the “many spaces in multileveled time” (55); of the “multispatial” (229). Again in From Cliché to Archetype on the “grammatical method”: it is “multi-leveled exegesis”, a “multi-leveled literary approach” that therefore is able to investigate “the multi-leveled phenomena of the world” (all on 128).
  12. Cf, Socrates’ ‘second sailing’ (τὸν δεύτερον πλοῦν, Phaedo 99c-d).
  13. Not only between but also within each of the “two great principles” there is a corresponding gap: “The sounds we utter are structured in acoustic space by noise spaced in silence. What silence is to acoustic space, darkness is to visual space” (Counterblast, 1969, 117).
  14. See ‘The humble ditch‘.
  15. Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process, 1951.
  16. Environment As Programmed Happening (1968).
  17. See the discussion of the ‘rider’ in Vortex atoms in 19th century physics.
  18. For McLuhan, the archetypal technology is language and there is no human being without language. Hence, there is no human being without such a “technological gap”.
  19. See Archetypes as inherently plural.

Virtual coinage

1972
PROMISES PROMISES PROMISES — 
People of promise, and promising enterprises, like promissory notes, have become inseparable from the promises of promotion and advertising itself. Money in turn is a promise to pay promises, and the plausible con man has returned as the stand-in for the traditional gentleman.
Inflation Is Pollution: The Dilution of Promises — Inflation is a tribute levied by those who know on those who don’t. As W. C. Fields saw it, “Never give a sucker an even break.” In a world of promises and con men only the sucker will take valuable time to acquire socially useful skills, such as carpentry or plumbing or “keeping” the books. (Take Today, 79)

1974
Like our money, which is a ‘promise to pay’, our advertising and P.R. only promise to pay promises.  (Foreword to Abortion in Perspective)

The world too much with us

1974
When Sputnik put the entire planet inside a man-made environment of information, the world may have seemed to become much smaller, but it also became much more obsessive and demanding. The power of the world to invade every feature of our personal lives has been given a kind of medieval Morality Play treatment (…) It is almost as if we had revived “for real” [for real!] the popular medieval narratives (…) As the world manifests its credentials and rewards in
ever more theatrical terms, it becomes ever more difficult for some to resist the world (…) Even theatrically speaking, the drama of the world has become more and more a mockery of merely human satisfactions, when it is quite evident that the richest people in the world have to become “hotel hermits” for security reasons, and when the most powerful people in the world lead lives of frantic uncertainty. (Foreword to Abortion in Perspective)

Present depicted 60 years ago

1959
since [the advent of] printing it has been the poets and painters who have explored and predicted the various possibilities of print, press, telegraph, photograph, movie, radio, and television. In recent decades the arrival of several new media has led to prodigious experimentation in the arts. But, at present, the artists have yielded to the media themselves. Experimentation has passed from the control of the private artist to the groups in charge of the new technologies. Whereas in the past the individual artist, manipulating private and inexpensive materials, was able to shape models of new experience years ahead of the public, today the artist works with expensive public technology, and artist and public merge in a single experience. The new media need the best artist talent and can pay for it. But the artist can no longer provide years of advance  awareness of developments in the patterns of human experience which will inevitably emerge from new technological development. (Electronics and the Changing Role of Print)

 

 

Eliot on Scylla and Charybdis

In 1952 Eliot gave a lecture titled ‘Scylla and Charybdis’. It was not published until 19851 and may have been unknown to McLuhan.  But he was publishing on Eliot at the time and was part of a loose group of figures, including Eliot, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis themselves, who were often longtime friends (Eliot, Pound and Lewis had known each other by then for over 40 years) and who were publishing poetry and essays on literary  and social matters in journals like The Sewanee Review and Shenandoah.  Eliot, Pound and Lewis all contributed to both these journals and McLuhan published more than a dozen essays and reviews in them in the 1940s and 50s. He was in correspondence with Pound and Lewis, while friends of his like Felix Giovanelli and Hugh Kenner were in touch with Eliot. Within this loose network much more was known about the activities of its various members than what found its way into print. So McLuhan may well have heard of Eliot’s lecture, if not seen it in samizdat.

However that may be, there are themes in the lecture which echoed Eliot’s past work and were of under active investigation by McLuhan at just that time.

The myth [of Scylla and Charybdis] belongs to that Mediterranean world from which our culture springs; it refers to a well-known episode in Mediterranean pre-history; like other myths in the story of Ulysses it is what I believe Professor Jung would call a universal archetype of human experience. It responds to some of the deepest desires, and terrors of all human beings: it is the experience of life itself. It is applicable to almost any subject one can discuss. (6)

The considerations I have been discussing are not, of course, equally applicable to every type of poetry, nor are they equally important in every poem of the same type. They are applicable to the degree in which philosophical ideas have contributed to forming the poet’s mind and have been digested into (we might say composted into) that profound couche of experience which constitutes the soil in which the germs of his poetry are nourished. They are peculiarly applicable when the matter of a poem, rich with philosophical ingredients, is organised into a structural design. (18)

Valéry’s poem has what I call the philosophic structure: an organisation, not merely of successive responses to the situation, but of further responses to his own responses. He has put more of himself into the poem — to that point at which the surrendering of the maximum of one’s being to the poem ends by arriving at the maximum of impersonality.  (19-20)

Eliot puts forward the view that the work of the individual poet is isomorphic with the work of western civilization (“that Mediterranean world from which our culture springs”) and even of “life itself”. All are founded in “that profound couche (…) which constitutes the soil in which the germs (…) are nourished”. It is the job of the poet (or at least of some poets) to reconnoiter the pathways to and from this seedbed and to formulate for us how it stands with it

Here is McLuhan in essays from this same time (some predating Eliot’s lecture):

1949
Mallarmé (…) saw that a poetry of effect was impersonal. The author effaced himself above all in not assigning causes or explanations as transitional devices of a novelistic and a 
pseudo-rationalistic type between the parts of the poem. Poetry could free itself at last from rhetoric and the novel. Insofar as a rationale of poetry was needed it is to be found naturally in the analogical drama of the very action of the intellect itself in making poetry. (Mr. Eliot’s Historical Decorum)

1951
the business of the artist in this context is that of an impersonal agent
, humble before the laws of things, as well as before his own artistic activity as revealer. He must strip himself of all but his mere agency…
 (Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process)

1953
the artist, in order that he may perform his katharsis-purgative function, must mime all things. (…) 
He must become all things in order to reveal all. And to be all he must empty himself. Strictly within the bounds of classical decorum Joyce saw that, unlike the orator, the artist cannot properly speak with his own voice. The ultimate artist can have no style of his own but must be an “outlex” through which the multiple aspects of reality can utter themselves. That the artist should intrude his personal idiom between thing and reader is literally impertinence. (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial)

1953
“Every letter is a godsend,” wrote Joyce. And, much more,
every word is an avatar, a revelation, an epiphany. For every word is the product of a complex mental act with a complete learning process involved in it. In this respect words can be regarded not as signs but as existent things, alive with a physical and mental life which is both individual and collective. The conventional meanings of words can thus be used or disregarded by Joyce, who is concentrating on the submerged metaphysical drama which these meanings often tend to overlay. His puns in the Wake are a technique for revealing this submerged drama of language (…) For his view of the poet was that he should read, not forge, the signatures of things. As he explains in Stephen Hero, this involves the poet in a perpetual activity of retracing and reconstructing the ways of human apprehension.(James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial)

1954
it was Mallarmé who formulated the lessons of the press as a guide for the new impersonal poetry of suggestion and implication. He saw that
the scale of modern reportage and of the mechanical multiplication of messages made personal rhetoric impossible. Now was the time for the artist to intervene in a new way and to manipulate the new media of communication by a precise and delicate adjustment of the relations of words, things, and events. His task had become not self-expression but the release of the life in things. (Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press)

1954
Mallarmé regarded the press as this ultimate encyclopedic book in its most rudimentary form.
The almost superhuman range of awareness of the press now awaits only the full analogical sense of exact orchestration to perfect its present juxtaposition of items and themes. And this implies the complete self-effacement of the writer for “this book does not admit of any signature.” The job of the artist is not to sign but to read signatures. Existence must speak for itself. It is already richly and radiantly signed. The artist has merely to reveal, not to forge the signatures of existence. But he can only put these in order by discovering the orchestral analogies in things themselves. (…) All those pseudo-rationalisms, the forged links and fraudulent intelligibility which official literature has imposed on existence must be abandoned. And this initial step the press has already taken in its style of impersonal juxtaposition which conveys such riches to the writer. (…)  Mallarmé sees this impersonal art of juxtaposition as revolutionary (…) It is the rhyming and orchestrating of things themselves which releases the maximum intelligibility and attunes the ears of men once more to the music of the spheres. We are finished, he says, with that custom of an official literary decorum by which poets sang in chorus, obliterating with their personal forgeries the actual signatures of things. In fact, the new poet will take as much care to avoid a style that is not in things themselves as literary men have in the past sought to achieve and impose one.  (Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press)

In this view (which was far from being only McLuhan’s) humans are “amphibians” (as McLuhan cited Lewis from Snooty Baronet) who constantly move between the surface of life, language and consciousness and their motivating “germs” in an underlying seedbed. The great questions of the time, even in cybernetics, concerned this general picture and the ways in which it might be specified, investigated and communicated. McLuhan’s turn to media, which began to unfold at this time in the early 1950s, was his answer to these questions.

  1. T.S. Eliot, Scylla and Charybdis’ (Lecture in Nice, March 29, 1952), Agenda, ed W Cookson and P Dale, 23:1-2, 1985, 5-19.

Scylla and Charybdis 1

In a startling example of second sight, McLuhan’s short Manitoba M.A. thesis on George Meredith (1934) cited one passage from Meredith no less than four separate times:

speeding of us, compact of what we are, between the ascetic rocks and the sensual whirlpools, to the creating of certain nobler races now very dimly imagined1… (Meredith, Diana of the Crossways, chapter 37, cited by McLuhan, George Meredith as a Poet and Dramatic Novelist, at pages 39, 48, 63 and 82)2

The whirlpool or worldpool or vortex or Maelstrom would become, of course, a central theme and image in McLuhan’s whole enterprise. But, twenty and thirty years after his Manitoba M.A. thesis, he also specifically discussed “Scylla and Charybdis, rock and whirlpool”, themselves:

1953
Joyce underlines the skill of Bloom’s social decorum in a peculiarly witty way. Homer’s Odysseus learns from Circe that after passing the Sirens there were two courses open to him. One is by way of the Wandering Rocks, which Jason alone had passed in the 
Argo. The other is the way of Scylla and Charybdis, rock and whirlpool. Odysseus avoids the labyrinth of the Wandering Rocks. But Bloom navigates both labyrinths safely, thus excelling Odysseus. The Rocks are citizens and society seen in abstraction as mindless, Martian mechanisms. The “stone” men are children of the sun, denizens of space, exempt from time (…) Opposed to them are “The Dead” (see last story in Dubliners) children of the moon, the Celtic twilight (“cultic twalette”), moving in the aquacities of time, memory, and sentiment. On these dual labyrinths of stone and water Joyce has built almost every line he has written. (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial)

1962
What could be more practical for a man caught between the Scylla of a literary culture and the Charybdis of post-literate technology to make himself a raft of ad copy? He is behaving like Poe’s sailor in the Maelstrom who studied the action of the whirlpool and survives. May not it be our job in the new electronic age to study the action of the new vortex on the body of the older cultures? (The Gutenberg Galaxy, 77)

While Meredith’s “creating of certain nobler races” might strikes us today as dubious and potentially dangerous, McLuhan’s larger (if less grandiose) goal could certainly be thought to have concerned human and even biological survival “now very dimly imagined”.

 

  1. At the end of his thesis at 117, McLuhan cited a part of this passage for a fifth (!) time: “certain nobler races now very dimly imagined”.
  2. A trace of this early citation and its unusual use of ‘compact’ may be found in McLuhan’s remark 30 years later: “The bomb is our environment. The bomb is of higher learning all compact, the extension division of the university.” (‘Notes on Burroughs’, 1964)

Blackout

In 1936, McLuhan’s last undergraduate year at Cambridge, his friend there1 and later unofficial adviser on his PhD thesis, Muriel Bradbrook (1909-1993), published The School of Night: A Study in the Literary Relationships of Ralegh.2  Influenced or not by Bradbrook’s study, which he certainly knew3, McLuhan adverted to blackout (and associated themes like obscurity and somnambulism) throughout his career and did so both positively and negatively. Negatively, black signaled an omission, a failure of perception, a gap in awareness. Positively, the gap strangely designated by such obscurity was, as McLuhan would insist over and over and over again, ‘where the action is’. So black covered something up which needed to be discovered  — and so functioned as a signpost and means to what required recovery.

1944
As excessive activity [has] starved the other needs of man and sharpened the spirit of gain and commercialism [such that] 
an unofficial blackout [has been] ordained over the spiritual and intellectual areas of man’s nature. (Dagwood’s America)

1953
THE ADS ARE A FORM OF MAGIC WHICH HAVE COME TO DOMINATE A NEW CIVILIZATION 
Most people must by now have seen the original advertisement featuring a Clifton Webb sort of gentleman wearing a white shirt and having a black patch over one eye. This advertisement sold a million Hathaway shirts in a few weeks, but few ever found out why. The ad was a piece of abstract art, of unabashed symbolism… (The Age of Advertising)

As illustarted below, McLuhan reverted again and again to the Hathaway man.  Not seeing that it was remarkable (let alone what was remarkable about it) seemed to capture for him not-seeing in general. The Gutenberg galaxy formula illustrated by the ad was: seeing can be blind.4 As McLuhan noted in testimony before the US Congress: “Opposites are often very similar. They’re complementary. Affluence creates poverty, public creates privacy, white creates black, learning creates ignorance.5

1953
The spoken word instantly evokes not only some recently conceived idea but reverberates with the total history of its own experience with man. We may be oblivious of such overtones as of the spectrum of colour in a lump of coal. But the poet by exact rhythmic adjustment can flood our consciousness with this knowledge. (Culture Without Literacy, 1953)

1954
like symbolist art, [advertising] is created to produce an effect rather than to argue or discuss the merits of a product. The Baron Wrangel, the man in the Hathaway shirt — white shirt and black eye-patch: what did it mean? Out of the millions who bought Hathaway shirts, how many could say what the ad meant? It was a piece of magic: irrational, meaningless. But it had a definite effect. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters)

1956
The manuscript page with pictures, colors, and correlation between symbol and space, gave way to uniform type, the black-and-white page, read silently, alone. (The New Languages, [McLuhan and Carpenter])

Gutenbergian visual emphasis fixes black and white on the same horizontal level in strictly sequential order. This is how print looks and how print functions. “The print reader is subjected to a black and white flicker that is regular and even. Print presents arrested moments of [just this] mental posture [and no other]” (The Gutenberg Galaxy, 158). By contrast, the acoustic allows the black to cut through the white, and the white to cut through the black, vertically. Only so can there be something like figure and ground. And if no figure and ground, then no ground and only figure — and if only figure, ultimately no figure either.6

1959
because of its static aspect, the written word inspires the human mind with doubt. This is the habit of the eye. This is the habit of the eye inspecting writing: black-white … yes-no … maybe yes-maybe no. Scepticism is the very form of written culture. (Communications and the Word of God)

1962
“She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold
Of Night Primaeval, and of Chaos old!
(…)
Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;
Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor’d;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All.”
This is the Night from which Joyce invites the Finnegans to wake. (The Gutenberg Galaxy, 263/298)

These are the concluding lines (before its final short section, or appendix, on ‘The Galaxy Reconfigured’) of The Gutenberg Galaxy.

1965
There is a subplot in the famous Hathaway shirt advertisement of the baron with the black patch on his eye. The main plot is simply Hathaway shirts. The subplot, the one that really includes the whole audience, is the black patch which bespeaks the world of aristocratic intrigue, hunts for hidden treasure, and many other mysterious dimensions, all expressed instantaneously by the black patch. The subplot world, the sub-environment, is really that which includes the audience, and it is the power to effect this kind of inclusion that is the mystery… (Address at Vision 65)

1968
Black Is Not A Color (Dew-Line #1)

1970
White is all colors at once, but black is not in the
spectrum. It is a gap. (…) The spectrum gap that is black (…) is not a color but an interval (Culture is our Business, 220, 226)

1970
When the separated or specialized senses are heavily over­loaded, one tends to black out, to merge. (From Cliché to Archetype, 196)

1972
You cannot have a written tradition of white markets (…) without an oral tradition of black markets… (Take Today, 171)

1972
The idealists share with the experienced and practical men of their time the infirmity of substituting concepts for percepts. Both concentrate on a clash between past experience and future goals that black out the usual but hidden processes of the present. Both ignore the fact that dialogue as a process of creating the new came before, and goes beyond, the exchange of “equivalents” that merely reflect or repeat the old. (Take Today, 22)

 

  1. McLuhan mentions being “at tea” in Bradbrook’s rooms with her tutor and a group of others in a letter to his family from May, 1935 (Letters 67). His calling her “Miss B” in this letter from his first year in Cambridge would indicate that he had mentioned her before, perhaps frequently.
  2. Republished by CUP in 2011; often cited with Bradbrook’s Ralegh changed to Raleigh.
  3. Introducing her theme, Bradbrook notes that “there has been a growing interest in the literary activities of Ralegh, and in particular in the society founded by him, and known now by Shakespeare’s nickname ‘The School of Night’. There appears to have been a kind of literary ‘war’ between this school and the faction of Essex, not unlike the dramatists’ ‘war’ of 1598-9, or the earlier one between Harvey and Nashe” (7, emphasis added). The last chapter of the book is titled ‘Shakespeare, the School (of Night), and Nashe‘. McLuhan’s PhD thesis, The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of his Time was completed 7 years later and would be an extended examination of the history of just such ‘wars’ over the two millennia from 400 BC to Shakespeare with special reference to Nashe. The background questions, to which McLuhan would dedicate his intellectual life, were: what is it about human life that such ‘wars’ are recurrent? how do they manifest themselves? how is it that tradition and communication nonetheless continue?
  4. Conversely, as repeatedly noted by McLuhan, ancient seers were often blind.
  5. ‘The Hardware/Software Mergers: How Successful Have They Been?’, Hearings, Ninety-second Congress, H.R. 4916, Sept 13, 1972.
  6. See Nietzsche, ‘How the “true world” finally became a fable‘.

What is the present?

Present: adj, c. 1300, “existing at the time”, from Old French present “evident, at hand, within reach”; as a noun, “the present time” (11c., Modern French présent) and directly from Latin praesentem (nominative   praesens) “present, at hand, in sight; immediate; prompt, instant; contemporary”, from present participle of praeesse “be before (someone or something [in space]), be at hand”, from prae “before” (see pre-) + esse “to be” (from PIE root *es- “to be”). Meaning “being there” is from mid-14c. in English. As a grammatical tense, recorded from late 14c. (Online Etymology Dictionary)

With our Vortex the Present is the only active thing.
Life is the Past and the Future.
The Present is Art.
(Wyndham Lewis, ‘Long Live the Vortex!’, Blast 1, 1914)

the artist, as Wyndham Lewis said to me, “is engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is aware of the unused potential of the present.” (Technology, the Media, and Culture, 1959)1

We simply have to (…) become contemporaries of ourselves. (Electronics and the Changing Role of Print, 1959)

Only those who have learned to perceive the present can predict the future. (…) For the future of the future is the present. (Take Today, 134)

*

McLuhan’s notion that most people don’t perceive the present is well known. Here are some typical examples:

1954
NOBODY yet knows the language inherent in the new technological culture; we are all deaf-blind mutes in terms of the new situation. Our most impressive words and thoughts betray us by referring to the previously existent, not to the present.
(‘Five Sovereign Fingers Taxed The Breath’, 1954 Counterblast)

1967
We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future. (The Medium is the Massage, 74-75)

1967
When a new environment forms, we see [only] the old one as if we lived in a world of the déjà vu. (…) Much learning theory still accepts this illusion (…) that we must learn by going from the familiar to the unfamiliar. Yet this strategy merely ensures that whenever we encounter the unfamiliar, we will translate it into something we already know. It is this that seems to make the present almost impossible to apprehend… (The Future of Morality: inner vs outer quest)

1967
People have always, in all ages, been terrified of the present. The only people that seem to have enough gumption, or nerve, to look at what is happening right under their nose are artists. They are specialists in sensory life. (…) But most people simply expect, when they look at the present, to be turned to stone, as by the gorgon’s spell, and they are terrified. Therefore they prefer the rear-view mirror. (McLuhan Interview on CBC ‘Our World’)

1968
The habit of avoiding the present or the new (…) has been immemorial human tradition
… (Environment As Programmed Happening)

1968
Ordinary human instinct causes people (…) to rely on the rear-view mirror
as a kind of repeat or ricorso of the preceding environment, thus insuring total disorientation at all times. It is not that there is anything wrong with the old environment, but it simply will not serve as navigational guide to the new one. (Through the Vanishing Point, xxiii)

But what is the present and why is it fearsome? The vague general idea seems to be that most people prefer the old to the new because they don’t want to make the effort to accommodate themselves to changed circumstance. While this is doubtless true, even of you and me, this answer does little more than restate the question — namely, what is the ‘effort to accommodate’ and why should it be fearsome?

McLuhan’s answer to these questions was that the process of accommodation is always going on — in “every moment of cognition” (Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry), “in every instant of perception” (CHML), “in every moment of human awareness” (CHML), in “the millions of repetitions of the cognitive labyrinth” (From Cliché to Archetype) —  but that we fear (or are otherwise discouraged2) to live it consciously and awake. That is, we don’t fear something that we don’t know, but something we ‘know’ all too well — something that is, however, unconscious and “hidden”, subject to blackout.3

McLuhan’s notion here was close to that of the psychoanalytic ‘unconscious’: there are processes in all human life which are constantly active that are yet not admitted to conscious awareness. And, like the psychoanalysts, McLuhan pointed to dreams as revealing these active yet largely unknown processes:

1967
Freud’s
Interpretation of Dreams reveals the amazing power that all people have in their dream life of invention and poetic discovery; that the most ordinary person in his dream life is a tremendous poet. Most Freudians are concerned with the subject-matter of this poetry. That never interested me. I was always fascinated by the amazing ingenuity, symmetry, and inventiveness of the dreamer. We all have these tremendous unused powers which we use surreptitiously. We are afraid to use them in our waking lives. Except the artist. The artist uses in his waking life the powers an ordinary person would use in his dream life. The creative man has his dream life while awake. (…) The dream is a way of processing waking experiences in a pattern which is non-lineal, but multi-leveled. (McLuhan interview with  Gerald Stearn, McLuhan Hot & Cool)

“The subject-matter (…) never interested me”: the medium is the message.

Again like the psychoanalysts, McLuhan saw these processes at work not only in dreams, but in every aspect of “everyday life” without exception. Not only now and then, but all the time. In this way, the present was conceived by McLuhan as including all those hidden processes through which we experience what we experience:

1951
The poetic process he [Joyce] discovered and states in Stephen Hero is the experience of (gen subj!) ordinary cognition, but it is that labyrinth reversed, retraced, and hence epiphanized. The moment of arrested cognition achieves at once its stasis and epiphany as a result of the reconstruction of the stages of ordinary apprehension. And every moment of cognition is thus a Beatrician moment when rendered lucid by a retracing of its labyrinth. (The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry)

1953
The spoken word instantly evokes not only some recently conceived idea but reverberates with the total history of its own experience with man. We may be oblivious of such overtones as of the spectrum of colour in a lump of coal. (Culture Without Literacy)

1954
the creative act of ordinary human perception
a greater thing and a more intricate process than any devised by philosophers or scientists. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters)

1954
The rational notes of beauty, integrity, consonance, and
claritas traced by St. Thomas were actual stages of apprehension in every moment of human awareness. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters) 

1954
the poetic process (…) is involved in ordinary cognition
(Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters)

1970
Stephen’s surname is (…) “Dedalus,” i.e., “dead all us.” Joyce’s last story in Dubliners, “The Dead,” and the last lines of the Portrait explain the relation of the young artist to the 
dead; “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of ex­perience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated con­science of my race.” This verbal implication of ricorsothe millions of repetitions of the cognitive labyrinth (…) is the task of making sense, of waking the somnambulists in the labyrinth of cognition. (From Cliché to Archetype, 148-149)

1972
The idealists share with the experienced and practical men of their time the infirmity of substituting concepts for percepts. Both concentrate on a clash between past experience and future goals that blacks out the usual but hidden processes of the present. Both ignore the fact that dialogue as a process of creating the new came before, and goes beyond, the exchange of “equivalents” that merely reflect or repeat the old. (Take Today, 22)

1972
sensations and concepts [entail] (…) the continual transformation of sensory inputs into outputs of quite different kinds. Food for the mind is like food for the body; the inputs are never the same as the outputs! This pattern of non-lineality is evident in every human activity. (Take Today, 137)

McLuhan’s take on the present was that it implicated a synchronic descent into the formal possibilities of experience and that this descent had two chief modes.  It could be made perceptively or conceptually.4 The former might be imagined in terms of Poe’s mariner who saved himself in the Maelstrom by learning to understand how it functioned.  This involved a distance not only from his ship, but also from himself, since the possible vehicles in the flotsam and jetsam of the Maelstrom (as a representation of the possibilities ‘present’ in each recurrent moment of experience) were modalities of identity and awareness.  Their plurality could be investigated only by letting go of his own supposed singularity and its associated world. Since there is no world between worlds, he was able to save himself only by becoming nobody. But this is a kind of death and extinction and is feared as nothing else is.

In fundamental contrast to the mariner, the conceptual encounter with the present might be imagined in terms of the mariner’s brother, who was not able to ‘let go’ of the ship’s ‘ring’ and to ‘abandon ship’. Transfixed by fear, he could not learn what the vortex had to teach of the present — of what is ‘before’ us at every instant. He thereby, and therefore, went to his doom.

 

 

  1. McLuhan used this passage frequently.  It appears, sometimes with light variations, in at least a dozen different papers and books in the 1960s and 1970s. As early as 1953 in a review entitled ‘Symbolist Communication’ he noted, without mentioning Lewis, “art is a record of the future in so far as it is an expression of the unlived possibilities of the present”. This was clearly a highly important insight for him.
  2. In McLuhan’s take, mass media are grounded in our cognitive processes and attempt, with staggering success, to manipulate them. Part of his turn to media was the thought: if media are successful in manipulating how human beings live, they must do so on the basis of some genuine foundation, regardless if this is known or unknown to them. Therefore they are key to the investigation of what human being is and how it functions.
  3. All of the quotations in this paragraph come from passages given in full elsewhere in this post.
  4. Percept and concept align with synchronic and diachronic in time and with acoustic and visual in sensory emphasis.

Jung

1943
To the modern mind, schooled in Jung and Freud, ancient myth is once more alive and lancing, and able to stir the poetic imagination radically and polysemously. (The Classical Trivium, 157)

1944
Anthropology and psychology together have also revindicated the traditional ‘magical’ view of language fusing the seemingly distinct activities of the brothers Grimm, on the one hand, as philologists, and on the other, as students of folk-lore, so that we are once more in a position to adopt a sympathetic view of the divine Logos of late antiquity. Quite incidental to the radical readjustments in awareness we can relax where Francis Bacon is concerned. We can take him in our stride, as it were, nodding at him as a useful landmark in a great literary tradition whose representatives today are Jung and Count Korzybski. (Medieval Grammar as the Basis of Bacon’s Novum Organum)1

1944
Increasingly, I feel that Catholics must master C.G. Jung. The little self-conscious (unearned) area in which we live to-day has nothing to do with the problems of our faith. Modern anthropology and psychology are more important for the Church than St. Thomas to-day. (McLuhan to Walter Ong and Clement McNaspy, December 23, 1944, Letters 166)

1946
But la trahison des clercs has been to subordinate detached critical intelligence to the servile functions of “political” evangelism. They are thus the inheritors of the sectarian enthusiasms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries presenting a scientific demonstration of Jung’s social principle: “No psychic value can disappear without being replaced by another of equivalent intensity.”  (Footprints in the Sands of Crime, citing Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 1933)

1947
But it is clear enough to me that the abiding achievement of the past century has been in analytic psychology and as such the Catholic mind has yet to ingest let alone digest that achievement. (McLuhan to Walter Ong, December 1947, Letters 191)

1948
My little book on “books to read” comes along simply and quickly without effort on my part. (..) Panofsky’s Studies in Iconology is on because it provides simultaneously an introduction to medieval allegory (Dante) and the French symbolists and Jung. Jung is on not for his own sake but as an approach to myth and Joyce.  (McLuhan to Felix Giovanelli, Aug 1948)

1950
Immediately associated with this notion of speech is the sense of a collective human consciousness which is not merely psychological (Joyce and Eliot have always been sharply critical of Freud and Jung for this reason among others), but in the nature of a common drama of the race. (T S Eliot [review of 11 books])

1952
As Father White wrote concerning “Jung and the Supernatural” (Commonweal, March 14, 1952, p. 561):  “A living symbol does something to us; it moves us, shifts our center of awareness, changes our values.  Whether it is just looked at, or heard, acted out, painted out, written out, or danced out, it arouses not only thought, but delight, fear, awe, horror, perhaps a deeper insight.”  In other words, the symbols of our environment, commercial and artistic, are not just signs whose reference has to be understood for them to be efficacious. That is Cartesian and Lockean theory of communication which never fitted the facts. But Catholics today still hold to that theory of communication, and it hands them over bound and helpless to the consciously manipulated pagan rituals of art, literature and commerce. (‘Heart of Darkness’, unpublished review of Thompson, Melville’s Quarrel With God)

1953
As Father Victor White wrote concerning “Jung and the Supernatural”: “
A living symbol does something to us; it moves us, shifts our center of awareness, changes our values. Whether it is just looked at, or heard, acted out, painted out, written out, or danced out, it arouses not only thought, but delight, fear, awe, horror, perhaps a deeper insight.”  (…) Symbols are not just referential signs. They don’t just say something. They do something. And saying is also symbolic action. We are moving very rapidly today to a grasp of scriptural, poetic and social communication which promises to take up all the wealth of patristic insight and to go far beyond it. But we have no choice. We have either to surpass any previous age or to collapse into a new Babel. For our problems, like our means and opportunities, are of a scope beyond those of any previous age. (Symbolist Communication)

1962
Any phonetic alphabet culture can easily slip into the habit of putting one thing under or in another, since there is constant pressure from the subliminal fact that the written code carries for the reader the experience of the “content” which is speech. But there is nothing subliminal in non-literate cultures. The reason we find myths difficult to grasp is just this fact, that they do not exclude any facet of experience as literate cultures do. All the levels of meaning are simultaneous. Thus natives, when asked Freudian questions about the symbolism of their thoughts or dreams, insist that all the meanings are right there in the verbal statement. The work of Jung and Freud is a laborious translation of non-literate awareness into literary terms… (Gutenberg Galaxy, 72)

1964
Freud and Jung built their observations on the interpretation of the languages of both individual and collective postures and gestures with respect to dreams and to the ordinary acts of everyday life. The physical and psychic gestalts, or “still” shots, with which they worked were much owing to the posture world revealed by the photograph. The photograph is just as useful for collective, as for individual, postures and gestures, whereas written and printed language is biased toward the private and individual posture. Thus, the traditional figures of rhetoric were individual postures of mind of the private speaker in relation to an audience, whereas myth and Jungian archetypes are collective postures of the mind with which the written form could not cope, any more than it could command mime and gesture. (Understanding Media, 193-194) 

1964
the logic of
the photograph is neither verbal nor syntactical, a condition which renders literary culture quite helpless to cope with the photograph. By the same token, the complete transformation of human sense-awareness by this form involves a development of self-consciousness that alters facial expression and cosmetic makeup as immediately as it does our bodily stance, in public or in private. This fact can be gleaned from any magazine or movie of fifteen years back. It is not too much to say, therefore, that if outer posture is affected by the photograph, so with our inner postures and the dialogue with ourselves. The age of Jung and Freud is, above all, the age of the photograph, the age of the full gamut of self-critical attitudes.  (Understanding Media, 197) 

1970
The cliché (…) is incompatible with other clichés, but the archetype is extremely cohesive; other archetypes’ residues adhere to it
. When we consciously set out to retrieve one archetype, we unconsciously retrieve others; and this retrieval recurs in infinite regress. In fact, whenever we “quote” one consciousness, we also “quote” the archetypes we exclude; and this quotation of excluded archetypes has been called by Freud, Jung, and others “the archetypal unconscious.”
(From Cliché to Archetype, 21-22)

1970
As we meditate upon the ancient cliches or sacro-breakthroughs, the literal man is inclined to consider them as “archetypes.” For example, Northrop Frye in
Anatomy of Criticism defines archetype as “a symbol, usually an image, which recurs often enough in literature to be recognizable as an element of one’s literary experi­ence as a whole.” Of course this particular definition is most un-­Jungian in suggesting that archetypes are human artifacts produced by much repetition — in other words, a form of cliche. For the literary archetypalist there is always a problem of whether Oedipus Rex or Tom Jones would have the same effect on an audience in the South Sea Islands as in Toronto. With the new means of plenary cultural retrieval, ancient cliches are taking their place as transcendental or archetypal forms.
(From Cliché to Archetype, 118)

1971
The simple process by which the unconscious was pushed up into con­sciousness with the help of electricity, Freud and Jung is one of the big dramas of our time. And it’s true that the private identity, the private individual has been swept away by this huge surge of the unconscious up into consciousness. (Theatre and the Visual Arts)

Posthumous
The archetype, which depends on an overarching comprehension of the past (the mythic milieu), is retrieved awareness or consciousness. It is consequently a retrieved combination of clichés — an old cliché brought back by a new cliché. (The Global Village, 16)

Posthumous
Jung is careful to remind literary critics to consider the archetype as a primordial symbol: The archetypes are by no means useless archaic survivals or relics. They are living entities, (…) numinous ideas or dominant representations. (The Global Village, 17)

 

 

  1. Cited in Gordon, Escape into Understanding, 380n8. McLuhan retouched and retitled this Bacon essay at least 4 times between 1942 and 1944. It was originally announced as a lecture for a 1942 MLA meeting that was cancelled on account of the war and ultimately given as a lecture in a later meeting of the MLA in 1944. See, eg, ‘Francis Bacon’s Patristic  Inheritance’, McLuhan  Studies I (1991) and ‘Medieval Grammar as the Basis of Bacon’s Novum Organum‘, EME, 6:3,  2007. An abstract for the 1944 lecture was published in the MLA conference program: “The art of grammar in Greek and Roman times was, in its etymological and analogical functions,  inseparable from physics, cosmogony and the interpretation of phenomena, or the book of nature. Philo of Alexandria adapted the art with its four levels of interpretation, to scriptural exegesis. Patristic theology took over his methods and the encyclopedic tradition in education it implied. Until the time of Abelard grammatical theology and science were supreme. Its temporary eclipse did not effect a breach in continuity. St Bonaventure was its greatest exponent. Erasmus was the key figure for his contemporaries because he restored grammatical theology while struggling against decadent dialectical theology. Bacon’s significance is best understood in this tradition and against this background. His conception of the problem of interpreting of nature is primarily, though not finally, grammatical.”

Archetypes as inherently plural

1946
But la trahison des clercs has been to subordinate detached critical intelligence to the servile functions of “political” evangelism. They are thus the inheritors of the sectarian enthusiasms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries presenting a scientific demonstration of Jung’s social principle: “No psychic value can disappear without being replaced by another of equivalent intensity.”  (Footprints in the Sands of Crime, citing Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 1933)

1970
The cliché (…) is incompatible with other clichés, but the archetype is extremely cohesive; other archetypes’ residues adhere to it. When we consciously set out to retrieve one archetype, we unconsciously retrieve others; and this retrieval recurs in infinite regress. In fact, whenever we “quote” one consciousness, we also “quote” the archetypes we exclude; and this quotation of excluded archetypes1 has been called by Freud, Jung, and others “the archetypal unconscious.” (From  Cliché to Archetype, 21-22)

  1. Such “quotation of excluded archetypes” might be called “the living inter-relational current of forms”. Cf, ‘Media Alchemy in Art and Society’, 1958: “Massive achievements like Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time, and Architecture or his Mechanization Takes Command offer as it were a vivisectional awareness of the living inter-relational current of forms and information.” Hence, in a letter from McLuhan to J. G. Keogh, July 6, 1972: “my approach to media is metaphysical rather than sociological or dialectical (…) I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities.” (Letters, 412,)

X-ray awareness, the inside story

the inside story (…) is typical of X-ray photographs, boudoir journalism, and cubist painting alike. (The Mechanical Bride, 49-50)

the characteristic mode of learning and knowing since the telegraph offers a pattern of instantaneous inter-cultural x-ray, very different from the enclosed spaces of literature. Man is no longer monad but nomad. (Have with You to Madison Avenue or The Flush-Profile of Literature, 1957)1

Already, new “sex symbols” poke fun at the super female. Notable among them is the boyish and gentle young model known as Twiggy. Sophia Loren, for example, is to Twiggy as a Rubens painting is to an X-ray. And what does an X-ray of a woman reveal? Not a realistic picture, but a deep, involving image. Not a specialized female, but a human being. (The Future of Sex, 1967)

The kids have grown up in an x-ray world. The TV camera does a perpetual job of x-ray on them and they take this for granted. X-ray means depth, x-ray means participation in depth in whatever they are doing, and calls for a totally new kind of commitment to everything they are doing. That is why when they encounter situations in which they are merely classified entities as in the school room, they don’t feel wanted, they don’t feel needed, they just drop out. Now, this strange, new all-at-once situation in which everybody experiences everything all at once creates this kind of x-ray mosaic of involvement and participation for which people are just not prepared. They have lived through centuries of detachment, of non-involvement, Suddenly they are involved. So it’s a big surprise, and for many people a kind of exhilaration. Wonderful! (McLuhan on CBC ‘Our World’, 1967)

TV demands sophistication — that is, multi-level perception. It is a depth medium, an X-ray form that penetrates the viewer. (All of the Candidates are Asleep, 1968)

The same speed of access to many kinds of data has given us the power to X-ray all the cultures and subcultures in the world. We no longer approach them from any point of view or for the purpose of taking a picture of them. The new approach is the X-ray approach of penetration in depth to achieve awareness on many levels at once. (…) The habit of avoiding the present or the new which has been immemorial human tradition tends to yield to this X-ray approach of the structures that shape and surround human perception. (Environment As Programmed Happening, 1968)

The mechanical proceeds by fragmentation of all processes, including the process of perception. The mechanical enthroned the “point of view,” the static position, with its vanishing point. The electric age favors a total field approach, a kind of X-ray in depth which not only avoids a point of view but avoids looking at situations from any single level. (Environment As Programmed Happening, 1968)

TV (…) is a kind of X-ray. (…) The viewer is in the situation of being X-rayed by the image. (Through the Vanishing Point, 241)

the tension between inner and outer is a merely visual guideline, and in the age of the X-ray inner and outer are simultaneous events.  (Through the Vanishing Point, 254)

One equivalent of psychoanalysis might be x-ray photography. Psychology without walls, on one hand; biology without walls, on the other. (Educational Effects of Mass Media of Communication, 1956; also Counterblast, 1969, 123)

Even the new instruments of sensory measurement draw attention to the iconic aspects of visual perception, An X-ray radiologist looks at his images as if he were handling them. (Cliche to Archetype, 100)

The cathode-ray tube is an x-ray. The audience is involved in depth. The TV image is not a picture but an icon. The TV camera has no shutter. (Culture is our Business, 36)

the X-ray vision of all processes renders invention an easy consequence of perceiving causes in action. (Take Today, 104)

ESP Is Old Hat When Effects Precede Causes: The patterns of formerly hidden processes now begin to obtrude on every hand. Prescience, prophetic vision, and artistic awareness are no longer needed to establish an understanding of the most secret causes of personal and social processes. Mere electric speed-up makes X-ray awareness natural. (…) Now involvement is so mandatory and loyalties so corporate that (…) means and goals merge in process (…) these patterns and processes thus become perceptible. (Take Today, 193-194)

television does not present a visual image, but an X-ray icon which penetrates our entire organism. Joyce called it “the charge of the light barricade” — part of the Crimean war against mankind. Stained-glass images are not visual either, since they are defined by light through, as in Rouault paintings. The structure of these images is audile-tactile, as in abstract art, both of Symbolist and Cubist kind. (McLuhan to Barbara Ward, Feb 9 1973, Letters, 465-468)

  1.  Unpublished review of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism.

Vatican Council as politics and business

Take Today, 194

At the Second Vatican Council, the participants paid no attention to the causes of their problems in their new policies and prescriptions. Whether politics and business have always been conducted with the same total obliviousness to causes may be left an open question. It seems necessary to postulate a profound motivation for such universal somnambulism. People in general seem to have a built-in intuition of the safe limits of their human awareness at any given time. Until this century, the limits have been set well below the threshold of rational control of the total environment. At electric speeds it is quite futile to set limits of awareness at that level.

Vivisection

Following Joyce in Stephen Hero, McLuhan used the term ‘vivisection’ between 1951 and 1960 to designate what he elsewhere called “percept”, “x-ray awareness”, “insight” and “retracing”.  It is the action of mind whereby it dis-covers the vertical descent and ascent it itself makes every moment in de-ciding the structure of its experience and action from out of the full spectrum of their formal possibilities:

this figure [of the labyrinth] is (…) traced and retraced by the mind many times in the course of a single [Thomistic] article. Perhaps this fact helps to explain the power of Thomas to communicate a great deal even before he is much understood. It certainly suggests why he can provide rich esthetic satisfactions by the very dance of his mind — a dance in which we participate as we follow him. His “articles” can be regarded as vivisections of the mind in act.  (Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process, 1951)

the conjunction of landscape and labyrinth provided Joyce with [a] vivisection of the stages of esthetic apprehension (…). As much, therefore, as the ancient Daedalus who made the labyrinth in Crete, Joyce had the right to name his hero “Stephen Dedalus” (the French form of the word). But it is not only the labyrinth of cognition in which Joyce made himself at home, tracing and retracing with delicate precision. The labyrinthine structure of the eye it is that gives such salience in his work to the figure of the Cyclops. Most of all he was at home in the labyrinth of the inner ear where he met Persse O’Reilly, who is per se, son of the Real. On the labyrinth of the ear, organ of the Incarnation, Joyce built those metaphysical analogies which enabled him to restore the orchestra of the seven liberal arts to its plenary functions. He is never less than the artist of the word. Ulysses is reared on the labyrinth landscape of the human body as the body politic; and Finnegans Wake whispers throughout with the voice of the river of human blood and immemorial racial consciousness. Joyce was at home in all labyrinths because of his original conquest of the stages of apprehension, of the mind in act. (…) [As Joyce writes in Stephen Hero:] “The modern spirit is vivisective. Vivisection is the most modern process one can conceive. The ancient method investigated law with the lantern of justice, morality with the lantern of revelation, art with the lantern of tradition. But all these lanterns have magical properties: they transform and disfigure.1 The modern method examines its territory by the light of day.”2 (Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process, 1951)

For Mallarmé, as for Joyce, the minutest, as well as the most esoteric, features of the alphabet itself were charged with dramatic significance, so that he used the word and the printed page as do the Chinese, for whom landscape painting is a branch of writing.  Mallarmé had been led to this technique by an aesthetic analysis of the modern newspaper, with its static inclusiveness of the entire community of men. But the newspaper, not so much as a cross section as a vivisection of human interests, stands (…) behind Ulysses, with its date-line Thursday, June 16, 1904.(…) What Mallarmé and Joyce exploit in landscape technique is its power of rendering an inclusive consciousness in a single instant of perception. (The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry, 1951)

Often noted from Montaigne onward is the growing interest in the anatomy of states of mind which in Giambattista Vico reached the point of stress on the importance of reconstructing by vivisection the inner history of one’s own mind. A century separates Vico’s Autobiography and Wordsworth’s Prelude, but they are products of the same impulse. Another century, and Joyce’s Portrait carries the same enterprise a stage further. Vico generalized the process as a means of reconstructing the stages of human culture by the vivisection and contemplation of language itself. (The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry, 1951)

For his [Joyce’s] view of the poet was that he should read, not forge, the signatures of things. As he explains in Stephen Hero, this involves the poet in a perpetual activity of retracing and reconstructing the ways of human apprehension. A poem is a vivisection of the mind and senses in action, an anagenesis or retracing, begetting anagnorosis or recognition. This is the key to the theme of memory and history embodied in Anna Livia of the Wake. She runs forward but “ana” is Greek for backwards, and speIls the same both ways. Anna Livia is also the Liffey nourishing the Guinnesses (anagenesis) of all things. It is the business of grammarian and poet to see this cyclic process of emanation and return as the origin and term of all words and creatures. (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial, 1953)

Massive achievements like Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time, and Architecture or his Mechanization Takes Command offer as it were a vivisectional awareness of the living inter-relational current of forms and information. (Media Alchemy in Art and Society, 1958)

it is precisely his fidelity to the vivisection of isolated moments that links Tennyson to the greatest work of his time and of ours. This concern with the spectrum of the emotional life was linked with Newton and with Gainsborough on one hand and with the best art and archaeology of the nineteenth century on the other.  It is to be related to the tendency to abandon succession for simultaneity when our instruments of observation acquired speed and precision. Looking back from the nuclear age it is easy to recognize the pattern of ‘total field’ forming in the concern with totality of implication in the aesthetic moment, or spot of time. (Tennyson and the Romantic Epic, 1960)

  1. One can imagine a light-bulb moment for McLuhan reading this sentence from Stephen Hero sometime in the late 1940s. If media as studied by Mallarmé, Innis and Havelock might be taken as “lanterns” with “magical properties” that both “transform and disfigure”, this sentence would bring together (a) the media insights from these three (a poet, an economist and a classicist), (b) Joyce and (c) the New Criticism he had learned especially from Richards where the “magical properties” of language, past and present, was a frequent topic. McLuhan’s whole subsequent career would be woven from these threads. Hence, for example, the title of his 1958 essay, ‘Media Alchemy in Art and Society’.
  2. This text from Stephen Hero was repeatedly cited by McLuhan. “The light of day” may be taken as implicating both the full spectrum of the different colors of the magical media “lanterns” as if through a prism and their study in “the light of day”. This reading of Joyce’s sentence was given 15 years later by McLuhan as follows: “If man, by his ingenious extensions of himself, creates new dimensions and new environments, he also has another creative power for making himself aware of these new forms, and of giving himself cognizance of their effect upon him.” (Alarums in a Brave New World, 1965)

The spectrum of forms

If man, by his ingenious extensions of himself, creates new dimensions and new environments, he also has another creative power for making himself aware of these new forms, and of giving himself cognizance of their effect upon him. (Alarums in a Brave New World, 1965)1

Any form of imbalance proves fatal at electric speeds with the superpowers released by the new technological resources representing the full spectrum of the human senses and faculties. Survival now would seem to depend upon the extension of consciousness itself as an environment.2 (Take Today, 14)

Perception as such is a proportion among proportions apprehended in our sensory life. (Take Today, 137)


In his PhD thesis on Thomas Nashe, written in 1941-42, McLuhan, just entering his 30s, began a life-long attempt to further the project to which he had been introduced by his undergraduate teachers at the University of Manitoba, Henry Wright and Rupert Lodge: the specification of the “forms of human organization”. Like Wright and Lodge (and through them going back via John Watson, 1847–1939, and Edward Caird, 1835–1908, to Hegel, 1770-1832), McLuhan saw the working of these forms throughout all the theoretical and practical realms of human life and society — not only in the intellectual disciplines of the arts and sciences, but in the everyday activities of practical politics, business, education and religion as well. Hegel had seen philosophy as inherently ‘encyclopedic’ and Lodge, McLuhan’s teacher in philosophy, published books on logic, on Plato and on “the great thinkers”, but also on Philosophy of Education (1937), Philosophy of Business (1945) and Applied Philosophy (1951). Wright, comparatively, published widely in philosophy and psychology, but also on politics and religion: Faith Justified by Progress (1916), The Moral Standards of Democracy (1925) — a book heavily annotated by McLuhan — and The Religious Response: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (1929).

But McLuhan’s work increasingly differed from such prior attempts to define the “forms of human organization” and this in a number of decisive ways. 

By the late 1940s, his interest in Wyndham Lewis, the poetics of the symbolists and futurists, and the work of his new colleague in Toronto, Harold Innis, led him to the realization that ‘mental activity’ could not be supposed to be confined within the skulls of human beings, individually or collectively.3  Instead, as the nascent fields of computer science and cybernetics were already demonstrating with real life devices,  intelligence exceeded humans and needed to be investigated more on the model of ecology than logic (although logic, too, was now subject to a broader understanding). Humans existed first of all in environments which were both material and intelligent (however little the latter was understood). This fitted with McLuhan’s longtime interest in the environment as a teaching machine which had been fostered (if not implanted) by Wright and Lodge in Winnipeg and then amplified in different ways by Chesterton and Leavis in the 1930s and by Lewis and Giedion in the 1940s.4

If whole environments might be conceived as mediating human identities, individual and collective, the radiating effects of particular media like books and newspapers and radio might be investigated both as models of environmental forms and as important, arguably the most important, components of such wider forms. Lewis, Innis, Havelock and even Richards were already thinking along these lines in the 1940s and McLuhan seems to have differed from them above all in his consternation at the difference between the enormous social effects of media — not just historically, but right here, right now — and the little or no notice taken of them. Modern humans were children playing with loaded guns.

In the 1950s McLuhan came in these ways to the idea that specification of the “forms of human organization” might be achieved, or at any rate decisively furthered, through intense focus on communications media.  But investigation of media would at the same time need to start aside from any notion of accepted differences between human and machine, high and low culture, past and future time, and individual and mass identity. Certainly none of these could be conflated; but at the same time no notions about such oppositions could be presupposed at the outset and all would need to be investigated as a critical part of the new science or sciences.

Against this background, it is noteworthy that McLuhan, from the start and continuing throughout his career, perceived the “forms of human organization” as arrayed in a “spectrum” or “axis” or “total field of relations”5 somewhat akin to Mendeleev’s table of chemical elements. In the citations given below, McLuhan characterized the “forms of human organization” in terms of many different relations (male/female, visual/auditory, mechanical/organic, above/below, light/dark, etc); but what is common to them all is the notion that such forms are based on variable binary structures arrayed along a “spectrum” or “axis” according to the degree of opposition of each one between its numerator and denominator (along with rules for establishing these). This spectrum was therefore the rule-governed series of all the possible instances of such formal structures — “the full spectrum of the human senses and faculties”. To compare, Mendeleev’s table similarly displays the chemical elements in terms of the possible relationships of electrons/protons set out along a spectrum ranging from the most simple to the most complex. Importantly, in the case of both proposals, each single form must be understood as an instance of the single elementary structure arrayed along the spectrum of its possible configurations.[For an important implication, see Archetypes as inherently plural.]


George McManus [Bringing Up Father cartoonist] was just as pro-Jiggs as Chic Young [Blondie cartoonist] is pro-Blondie. This is another way of saying that America has swung very far toward the feminine pole of the axis in recent years. (Dagwood’s America, 1944)

Baudelaire whose spectrum analysis of states of mind has sufficed poetry ever since as a base of operation. (…) What these poets effected after Baudelaire was that plenary elucidation of verbal landscape, psychological with Laforgue, metaphysical in Rimbaud. (T. S. Eliot [review of eleven books on Eliot], 1950)

For them [Joyce, Pound, Eliot] the aesthetic moment was, like the band of the spectrum, an affair of zoning. As Mallarmé stated the matter: “The poetic act consists in seeing suddenly that an idea fractions itself into a number of motifs equal in value, and in grouping them, they rhyme6.” (The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry 1951)

The poetic process he [Joyce] discovered and states in Stephen Hero is the experience of ordinary cognition, but it is that labyrinth reversed, retraced, and hence epiphanized. The moment of arrested cognition achieves at once its stasis and epiphany as a result of the reconstruction of the stages of ordinary apprehension. And every moment of cognition is thus a Beatrician moment when rendered lucid by a retracing of its labyrinth. Dante implies all this in the Beatrician moment of the Vita Nuova, but the pre-Raphaelites had accepted it at the relatively banal level of psychological impressionism. The Beatrician, or sacramental, moment when analyzed as a spectrum band yields the entire zoning of the hierarchized scenes and landscapes of the Commedia (…). As the eighteenth century recovered some of the techniques of the Middle Ages through their own development of the picturesque, so Joyce, Pound, and Eliot recovered the secret of the dolce stil nuovo through the prismatically arranged landscapes of Rimbaud and Mallarmé. (The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry 1951)

By means of the interior landscape, however, Baudelaire could not only range across the entire spectrum of the inner life, he could transform the sordidness and evil of an industrial metropolis into a flower.7 (Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry, 1951)

The spoken word instantly evokes not only some recently conceived idea but reverberates with the total history of its own experience with man. We may be oblivious of such overtones as of the spectrum of colour in a lump of coal. But the poet by exact rhythmic8 adjustment can flood our consciousness with this knowledge. (Culture Without Literacy, 1953)

Joyce employs (…) the lore associated with the ancient conception of the auditory side of the external world as an Aeolian harp. His color symbolism employs the complementary conception of the visual aspect of creation as the harp of Memnon9. With the development of the spectroscope in the eighteenth century both these ancient images became popular again. The color chord of the spectrum suggested that there exists a rapport between the outer world and the inner world of our faculties which developed into the symbolist doctrine of “correspondences”. (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial, 1953)

we have fashioned a Plotinian world-culture which implements the non-human and superhuman doctrines of neo-Platonic angelism to the point where the human dimension is obliterated by sensuality at one end of the spectrum, and by sheer abstraction at the other. (Nihilism Exposed, 1955)

using poetry as a means of exploring the spectrum of mental states (Introduction to Tennyson: Selected Poetry, 1955)

Both these idylls represent two extremes of demonic possession. “The Holy Grail” concerns the invasion of unprepared minds by “mania from above”. “Merlin and Vivien,” like “Lucretius,” presents the struggle and fall of the merely intellectual man when invaded by “mania from below“. (…) The reader of Tennyson’s poems will find everywhere in his landscapes the symbolic struggle of light and darkness as the drama of the divine and the demonic. Many of his most characteristically poignant effects, as in “Tears, Idle Tears,” the seventh elegy of “In Memoriam,” “Morte d’Arthur,” and “Crossing the Bar,” are rendered by means of twilight and the poise of opposite powers.  (‘Introduction’ to Tennyson: Selected Poetry, 1955)

Is not the artist one who lives perpetually on this borderland (…) between technology and experience, between mechanical and organic form? And when a time or a culture is similarly poised between the new technology and traditional experience is not that the moment of maximal creativity for that culture? (…) In this respect, one might say that [Northrop] Frye’s world is simply the slapping down of the poised balance on the visual side of the scale. (McLuhan to Wilfred Watson, October 8, 1959)

it is precisely his fidelity to the vivisection of isolated moments that links Tennyson to the greatest work of his time and of ours. This concern with the spectrum of the emotional life was linked with Newton and with Gainsborough on one hand and with the best art and archaeology of the nineteenth century on the other.  (Tennyson and the Romantic Epic, 1960)

The various structures of knowledge that have been devised by the numerous languages, arts and technologies of mankind can be revolved or inspected almost at the speed of motion picture frames. At such speed would not the unity of human culture and experience become manifest as a single spectrum? (We need a new picture of knowledge, 1963)10

In India the idea of darshan — of the mystical experience of being in very large gatherings—stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from the Western idea of conscious values [in the individual]. (UM, 110)

Where before there had been a narrow selection from periods and composers, the tape recorder, combined with LPs, gave a full musical spectrum that made the sixteenth century as available as the nineteenth, and Chinese folk song as accessible as the Hungarian. (UM, 283)

Newton’s Optics had an extraordinary influence on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry and painting alike. His revelation of the natural power of the eye to refract the visual world encouraged artists to select outer landscapes that isolated a particular mood or feeling from the emotional spectrum. (Through the Vanishing Point, 22) 

The low visual definition of the environment [of the Russian peasant] favored a high degree of tactile and acoustic stress. At this end of the sensory spectrum individuality is created by the interval of tactile involvement. At the other end of the sensory spectrum we encounter the familiar mode of individuality based on visual stress and fragmentary separateness. (Through the Vanishing Point, 222)

black is not a color. White is all colors at once, but black is not in the spectrum. It is a gap [in the spectrum]. (…) The spectrum gap that is black creates great involvement for all parties.  (…) black is not a color but an interval (Culture is our Business, 220, 226)

When a man-made environment circumvents the entire planet, moon, and galaxy, there is no alternative to total knowledge programming of all human enterprise. Any form of imbalance proves fatal at electric speeds with the superpowers released by the new technological resources representing the full spectrum of the human senses and faculties. Survival now would seem to depend upon the extension of consciousness itself as an environment.  (Take Today, 14)

There are only two basic extreme forms of human organization. (…) They have innumerable variants or “parti-colored” forms. (…) The extreme forms are the civilized and the tribal (eye and ear)…(Take Today, 22)11

The idealists share with the experienced and practical men of their time the infirmity of substituting concepts for percepts. Both concentrate on a clash between past experience and future goals that black out the usual but hidden processes of the present. Both ignore the fact that dialogue as a process of creating the new came before, and goes beyond, the exchange of “equivalents” that merely reflect or repeat the old.12 (Take Today, 22)

City planners seem to be incapable of understanding figure-ground relationships. They want uniformity. Everything [in their estimation] must become figure, or everything must become ground. The interface or interplay of figure and ground necessary to community, or social dialogue and diversity, are alien to their uniform concepts and blueprints.  (Take Today, 33)

Montaigne was the first to discover the meaning of the printed book: “I owe a complete portrait of myself to the public.” At the other end of the spectrum is J. P. Morgan, proclaiming “I owe the public nothing.”  (Take Today, 207)

While the “subjectivist” puts on the world as his own clothes, the “objectivist” supposes that he can stand naked “out of this world.”  (The Argument: Causality in the Electric World, 1973)

T S. Eliot pointed (…) out in regard to Dante, that a great poet or serious artist should be able to perceive or distinguish more clearly than ordinary men the forms and objects within the range of ordinary experience and be able to make men see and hear more at each end of the spectrum of their sensibility than they could ever notice without his help. (Laws of Media, 5)

  1.  Review of Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman, by D. S. Halacy, Winnipeg Free Press, December 11, 1965, p 73
  2. Many readers of McLuhan take it that “the extension of consciousness itself as an environment” is something mystical, a kind of oceanic fog emanating good vibes. But it is, on the contrary, simply (simply!) the extension of scientific understanding to all human experience and action.
  3. “If a person is speaking into a P.A. system or into a radio microphone, etc., the who and the what are profoundly transformed.” (Report on Project in Understanding New Media, ‘What I Learned on the Project’)
  4. The notion that environments had a mental element and could be studied scientifically led McLuhan in seemingly contradictory directions  On the one hand, low culture like comics might be investigated as readily as high culture like poetry.  To compare, what chemist would reject experiments with tin, say, as unworthy of the discipline? Perhaps tin could reveal more that silver — and similarly with low culture compared to high? On the other hand, a culture in which comics were used to manipulate children might well be judged harshly.  Readers of McLuhan have often failed to grasp the compatibility of these different approaches.
  5.  Environment As Programmed Happening (1968).
  6. “Rhyme” is used here as meaning something like ‘having a common origin’ — namely in “the band of the spectrum” of the “forms of human organization”. It is because this ‘aesthetic’ idea is applicable to all human experience and actions that McLuhan recommended it in his March 1951 letter to Innis as the basis for a new school of communication studies.
  7. Just as every physical material is ‘chemical’, so is every manifestation of culture, however “sordid and evil”, ‘formal’. To show the inherent exposure of humans to the formal elements of their experience and actions is itself transformative: “if the external world is attuned to the mind of man, then the whole of Nature is a language and the poet is a pontifex or bridger between the two worlds. He conducts the symphony of mind and nature. (…) The poet here is exercising his priestly powers of purifying the wells of existence, exerting his primary imagination which is the agent of all perception, not the secondary imagination which brings art into existence as an echo of the functions of perception.” (Coleridge As Artist, 1957)
  8. See note 4 above.
  9. Pausanias: “In Egyptian Thebes, on crossing the Nile to the so-called Pipes, I saw a statue, still sitting, which gave out a sound. The many call it Memnon, who they say from Aethiopia overran Egypt (…) This statue was broken in two by Cambyses, and at the present day from head to middle it is thrown down; but the rest is seated, and every day at the rising of the sun it makes a noise, and the sound one could best liken to that of a harp…”
  10. See TT 193: “The patterns of formerly hidden processes now begin to obtrude on every hand. Prescience, prophetic vision, and artistic awareness are no longer needed to establish an understanding of the most secret causes of personal and social processes. Mere electric speed-up makes X-ray awareness natural.”
  11. The bracketed insertion of “eye and ear” is McLuhan’s. These “extreme forms” characterize the reversible nominator/denominator fractions of the spectrum of forms and its two sides (depending on which is stressed relative to the other): “visual and acoustic space are always present in any human situation” (Global Village, 55).
  12. “The usual but hidden processes of the present” are the moment to moment retreat to the spectrum of basic forms or “percepts” and the de-cision there to align with one of them. These processes constitute a labyrinthine knot in time since ‘light on’ this spectrum can come only from it.

2017 foreseen in 1965

A prime sector for the development of the Cyborg idea is that of the military. Here the Buck Rogers world of supermen and super-soldiers is taken quite seriously. It is not only weapons that could be controlled remotely by a mere flick of the eye or turn of thought. This is the field of “systems” development and controls that increasingly occurs in the entire (…) operation of our world. (‘Alarums in a Brave New World’, Review of Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman, by D. S. Halacy, Winnipeg Free Press, December 11, 1965, 73)

When is ‘before’?

Here is a puzzling passage in ‘Art as Survival in the Electric Age’ (1973)1:

Poe hit upon the key to the electric age, programming from effects in order to anticipate causes. The effects come before causes in all situations. The ground comes before the figure in all situations. So that when any new innovation occurs, people are always able to say, “The time is ripe,” meaning the ground and the effects have come long before the causes. The effects come first, and the fact of the effects coming first indicates that the study of environmental action, or the action of the strom, must begin with the effects rather than with a theoretic pursuit of causes. (212-213)

The puzzles in this passage turn the meaning of the word ‘before’ — or on its meanings, plural.  For if “effects come before causes in all situations”, this cannot be the same ‘before’ as in “ground comes before the figure in all situations”.  Effects come before causes in our experience such that causes must be induced.2 But so little does ground “come before the figure” in our experience that McLuhan continually employed the phrase “hidden ground” and frequently characterized phenomena or whole ages as lacking perception of ground.  Eg:

Integrity concerns figure without ground (…). When the ground itself becomes Protean or bewildering in its multiplicity of changes, then the ordinary psyche abandons all hope of relating thereto and retreats to the ivory tower of integrity. (Take Today, 285-286)

The plays of Ibsen are a familiar example: groups of human figures are starkly presented to the audience minus any social ground or human community. This, in a word, is abstract art: figures without ground. Speed-up pushes all work and living towards specialism that is the dissolution of community. (…) What has happened today is that there is a new hidden ground of all human enterprise, namely, a world environment of electric information. (University of Alberta Convocation Address, 1971)

If “ground comes before the figure in all situations” it plainly does not do so in our experience. Or, more precisely, if any figure comes to light, as we say, only over against some prior ground, it is not the case that that ground is necessarily, or even usually, perceived. Indeed, McLuhan sometimes maintained that it was not possible to know present grounds at all, only past3 ones — as figures on unknown present ones.

When it is said here that “ground comes before the figure in all situations”, McLuhan is not talking about a ‘before’ in our experience — but about a ‘before’ to our experience.

In the order of things, ground comes first. The figures arrive later. Coming events cast their shadows before them. (The Global Village, 6)

In the order of things, ground comes first.”  But in our experience, effects come first and, insofar as figures may be said to be the effects of grounds, so do figures and not grounds.

The great problem is to understand these knotted senses of ‘before’ and the knotted times associated with them. Humans are related to “the order of things” only indirectly and, so to say, later.  However, it is somehow given to humans to understand “the order of things” that is before exactly in and through their remove from it.  Call it ‘communication’.

  1. Included in Understanding Me, 206-224
  2. See ‘Effect before cause in Gilson‘.
  3. But ‘past’ is subject to the same ambiguities as ‘before’.  In one sense, the only way to know a present ground is to know it as vertically past.

Knowing effects before they occur

In a review which originally appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press, McLuhan specified:

One of the results of accelerated change and innovation has been the recognition of the need for study of effects. As our environment tends to be more and more constituted by information everything has an effect on everything without delay. The entire social web becomes as sensitive and nervous as the stock-market, or the front page. The result is that it becomes necessary to know effects before they occur. This, in turn, requires a new kind of study of whatever is going on. (‘Alarums in a Brave New World’, Review of Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman, by D. S. Halacy, Winnipeg Free Press, December 11, 1965, 73)

But when “everything has an effect on everything without delay” another sense of time emerges that cuts across clock time and its “before”. In this other simultaneous sense of time, the synchronic, the understanding of causes emerges as anew possibility”:

1959
Survival indicates that we grasp by anticipation the inherent causes (…) of the electronic media in all their cultural configurations and make a fully conscious choice of strategy in education accordingly. (…) W
e need prescience of the full causal powers latent in our new media (…). A kind of alchemical foreknowledge of all the future effects of any new medium is possible. Under electronic conditions, when all effects are accelerated in their mutual collision and emergence, such anticipation of consequence is basic need as well as new possibility(‘Electronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media’, Understanding Me, 5, 8)

1964
Concern with effect rather than meaning is a basic change of our electric time, for effect involves the total situation, and not a single level of information movement. (Understanding Media, 26)

1972
ESP Is Old Hat When Effects Precede Causes
. The patterns of formerly hidden processes now begin to obtrude on every hand. Prescience, prophetic vision, and artistic awareness are no longer needed to establish an understanding of the most secret causes of personal and social processes. Mere electric speed-up makes X-ray awareness natural. (Take Today, 193)

Déjà vu

Because time is plural for McLuhan as times, and because everything is double, or at least double, words and phrases like ‘the past’, ‘history’, ‘déjà vu‘, ‘obsolescence’, ‘the old’, etc, carry complex meanings in his work. Passages like the following must therefore be read slowly and, so to say, both vertically and horizontally. A vertical reading of these words and phrases points to “another existence” in the realm of the spectrum of sensory thresholds from which synchronic ‘past’ or ‘déjà vu‘ we have come to our present experience.

When a new environment forms, we see the old one as if we lived in a world of the déjà vu. This was, of course, Plato’s theory of knowledge, that it was a form of recognition of that which we had known in another existence.  Much learning theory still accepts this illusion as a warranty that we must learn by going from the familiar to the unfamiliar. Yet this strategy merely ensures that whenever we encounter the unfamiliar, we will translate it into something we already know. It is this that seems to make the present almost impossible to apprehend in any period or culture. It was James Joyce in Finnegans Wake who demonstrated that the way to overcome the fear of the present, and of innovation in general, is to make an inventory of all the effects of the new thing as it encounters all the older forms of the society. Failure to make this inventory results in the use of the present as a nostalgic mirror of the past. (The Future of Morality: inner vs outer quest, 1967)

Strangely running them together, McLuhan discusses déjà vu in this passage in the two radically different ways of the vertical and the horizontal. He first mentions Plato’s theory of recollection according to which learning is achieved through the activation of the forgotten memory of what has been known before. But this is not a ‘before’ in chronological time or chronological sequence. It is not, like the second sort of déjà vu, an “illusion” which merely replicates the past horizontally and makes “the present almost impossible to apprehend” and could never result in the creation or recognition of “innovation”. Instead, this sort of Platonic déjà vu is exactly what enables innovation, and the apprehension of innovation, through a questioning of the assumptions of the present.  Assumptions are active in the present, but are not constant; questioning them requires a vertical descent into the time and space of “another existence” where assumptions are arrayed, decided, maintained and rejected.1 This sort of déjà vu, so far from translating the new into the old, and the unfamiliar into the familiar, effects the transformation or rebirth of experience through which, alone, innovation can come to light.

McLuhan touched on this sort of rebirth experience that gives access to the “totally different” in his 1972 interview with L’Express:

the key is that they [the young] return to a primitive existence, in which life is reduced to nothing, and they no longer have any kind of identity. They reject their own identity, and become no-one. (…) It is liberation, but when it is total liberation, it is like death. We all know the reincarnation thesis: we are freed from our own body; we can disappear right now and come back totally different next time. This is what we have reached.

In passages from this same time, McLuhan emphasized the first, vertical or “deep”, sense of déjà vu and again brought reincarnation into this context:

Is the déjà vu phenomenon, i.e. ‘I’ve been here before’, exotic with the ‘man of letters’, and normal and un-noticed by non-literate man?  If so it could account for the deep, reincarnational or déjà vu sense of the non-literate societies. The sensation itself may result from situations of deep sensuous involvement, natural in highly tactual cultures and environments. Ergo normal in childhood. May this not be the source of the abiding sense of reincarnation in non-literate societies and explain the lack of such sensation in literate societies? (Counterblast, 1969, 26)

oral culture is easily led to feel that something has been left out. Per­haps this is the origin of our feeling of déjà vu, the sense of having been “here” before. (Cliche to Archetype, 1970, 68)

  1. If assumptions were decided in chronological or clock time, experience would be mediate, not immediate.  Before taking in the world, or our own minds, we would have to go about the business of deciding what approach to take to them. This might raise the further question of what approach to take to our approaches.  And so on. Experience in this case might never start. As McLuhan noted in his review of Cyborg: “The goal-oriented man must defer involvement and participation in his world until he has acquired certain specialist skills.” But to “acquire certain specialist skills” might require “certain specialist skills” of their own. Hence the concluding note of this same review: “As we move our nerves outward into the environment of electric information, we all tend to become investigators, hunters, fact gatherers, somewhat on the ‘007’ pattern. This is the exact opposite of man the specialist, and points to the onset of a new human culture of unspecialized existence.”

The sensory thresholds of our being

Today with the revelation of the poetic process which is involved in ordinary cognition we stand on a very different threshold from that wherein Machiavelli stood. His was a door into negation and human weakness. Ours is the door to the positive powers of the human spirit in its natural creativity. This [2-fold] door opens onto psychic powers comparable to the physical powers made available via [that other 2-fold of] nuclear fission [F1] and fusion [F2]. Through this door men have seen a possible path to the totalitarian [F1] remaking of human nature. Machiavelli showed us the way to a new circle of the Inferno [F1]. Knowledge of the creative process in art, science, and cognition [F2] shows us the way either to the earthly paradise [F2] or to complete madness [F1]. It is to be either the top of Mount Purgatory [F2] or the abyss [F1]. (‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’, 1954, in The Medium and the Light, 160)

We are engaged in Toronto in carrying out a unique experiment — it is far too big for us — we need a lot of help and a lot of collaboration. We are carrying out an experiment to establish what are the sensory thresholds of the entire population of Toronto. That is, we are attempting to measure, quantitatively, the levels at which the entire population prefers to set its visual, auditory, tactile, visceral, and other senses as a matter of daily use and preference — how much light, how much heat, how much sound, how much movement — as a threshold level. Anything that alters a sensory threshold alters the outlook and experience of a whole society. The sensory thresholds change without warning or indications to the users thereof, for it is new technological environments that shift these levels. We are concerned with what shifts occur in a sensory threshold when some new form comes in. What happens to our sensory lives with the advent of television, the motor car, or radio? (Address at Vision 65, 1965)

We have no reason to be grateful to those who juggle the thresholds in the name of haphazard innovation. (Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment 1966)

New environments reset our sensory thresholds. These, in turn, alter our outlook and expectations. The need of our time is for the means of measuring sensory thresholds and of discovering exactly what changes occur in these thresholds as a result of the advent of any particular technology. With such knowledge in hand it would be possible to program a reasonable and orderly future for any human community. Such knowledge would be the equivalent of a thermostatic control for room temperatures. It would seem only reasonable to extend such controls to all the sensory thresholds of our being.  (Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment 1966; also Through the Vanishing Point, 253)

modern painting does not allow for the single point of view or the dispassionate survey. The modern painter offers an opportunity for dialogue within the parameters inherent in (…) the total world of man’s sensory involvement.  (Through the Vanishing Point, 261) 

Until this century, the limits have been set well below the threshold of rational control of the total environment. At electric speeds it is quite futile to set limits of awareness at that level. (Take Today, 192-193)

 

 

Marchand on McLuhan on the Maelstrom

The gulping or swallowing of Nature by the machine was attended by a complete change of the ground rules of both the sensory ratios of the individual nervous system and the patterns of the social order as well. (Notes on Burroughs, 1964)

in the age of the X-ray inner and outer are simultaneous events.  (Through the Vanishing Point, 254)

According to Philip Marchand in his bio of McLuhan, The Medium and the Messenger:

In ‘Footprints in the Sands of Crime’ McLuhan (…) articulated a theme that would remain his until the end of his career — the theme of Poe’s story “The Maelstrom.” In that story, a sailor caught in a giant whirlpool eventually saves himself from drowning through detached observation of the vortex. For McLuhan, the sailor’s action became a symbol, along with the sleuth, of his own work — of his freeing himself from the vortex of threatening social change through the process of understanding it. (McLuhan never mentioned that the hero of the story was broken in mind and body after the experience.)1

Marchand’s description here goes fundamentally awry. For, in the first place, McLuhan did indeed see “that the hero of [Poe’s] story was broken in mind and body” — to the point of “vanishing”:

Managing The ‘Ascent’ from the Maelstrom2 today demands awareness that can be achieved only by going Through the Vanishing Point. (Take Today, 13)3

More importantly, Marchand’s take on McLuhan’s appeal to the Maelstrom is that it concerns a “hero” who “saves himself (…) through detached observation” of “the vortex of threatening social change”. But such a stable heroic identity, however broken it might become, with an objective perspective on an exclusively external social environment, is possible only within the parameters of the Gutenberg galaxy!  As McLuhan repeatedly maintained:

From the development of phonetic script until the invention of the electric telegraph human technology had tended strongly towards the furtherance of detachment and objectivity, detribalization and individuality. Electric circuitry has quite the contrary effect. It involves in depth. It merges the individual and the mass environment. (…) The awareness and opposition of the individual are in these circumstances as irrelevant as they are futile.  (Through the Vanishing Point, 244)

In contrast to Marchand’s take, McLuhan started from ‘The Gutenberg Galaxy Reconfigured’4 and pointed to an “anti-hero” whose heroism has not only been broken but “has gone through the vanishing  point”:

The anti-hero became a theme in art and literature as early as Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, the “novel without a hero.” (…) The heroism of New England’s Pilgrim Fathers has gone through the vanishing point. (Take Today, 207)

“The vanishing point” is the utter extinction of the hero because the hero cannot survive the “vanishing” of his or her external — and associated internal — ‘landscape’. Where Marchand writes of “the vortex of threatening social change”, McLuhan was clear that the twin aspects of the “psychic and social environment” (Through the Vanishing Point, 12) rise and fall only together:

the slightest shift in the level of visual intensity produces a subtle modulation in our sense of ourselves, both private and corporate. (Through the Vanishing Point, 238)

As the Western world goes Oriental on its inner trip with electric circuitry (…) the whole nature of self-identity enters a state of crisis. (Through the Vanishing Point, 254)

The new hero is a corporate rather than a private individual figure.  (Through the Vanishing Point, 260)

Marchand’s “hero” is able to take “detached observation of the vortex”. But for McLuhan:

[only] the “objectivist” supposes that he can stand naked “out of this world.”  (The Argument: Causality in the Electric World, 1973)

For him, a collapsing environment collapsed such objectivity along with it:

Their [observers like Marchand] hidden hang-up was the visual bias of all “objectivity,” whether “materialist” or “idealist.” They also ignored the acoustic “message of the birds” — the output of any process, biological or psychic, always differs qualitatively from the input. There are no “through-puts” or connections between processes but only gaps or interfaces for “keeping in touch” with “where the action is.” (The Argument: Causality in the Electric World, 1973)

In his ‘Descent into the Maelstrom’ the mariner is just such a processing of (gen obj!) his own self!5 The “output” of himself “differs qualitatively from the input” of himself.  His own being —  he himself — is what is at stake in this knotted (and notted) process of trans-formation!  Between his input ‘down’ state (‘Descent into the Maelstrom’) and his output ‘up’ state (‘Ascent from the Maelstrom’) there are no ‘through-puts’ or connections between processes but only gaps or interfaces”.

Such a transitive gap in identity via “vanishing” is what Poe calls “the incomprehensible mechanism” and this is the one starting point or “threshold“, among the plurality or spectrum of possible thresholds, from which any fitting consideration of McLuhan’s work must make its start:

New environments reset our sensory thresholds. These, in turn, alter our outlook and expectations. The need of our time is for a means of measuring sensory thresholds and a means of discovering exactly what changes occur in these thresholds (Through the Vanishing Point, 253) 

Thresholds have us, not we them.6 Their spectrum constitutes a kind of psychological and ontological Maelstrom whose navigation “demands awareness that can be achieved only by going Through the Vanishing Point.”

 

  1. Philip Marchand, The Medium and the Messenger, 76. The last sentence stems from Marchand. It is bracketed, apparently, to signal a change of level in his report: here is what McLuhan said, but here is what I have remarked about what he said.
  2. Similarly in his letter to The Listener, October 8, 1971: “Poe provided clues for ascending from The Maelstrom” (Letters 443).
  3.  Similarly in Take Today, 207 (cited above): “The heroism of New England’s Pilgrim Fathers has gone through the vanishing  point.”
  4. ‘The Gutenberg Galaxy Reconfigured’ is the concluding section of The Gutenberg Galaxy.
  5. McLuhan to Father Shook, June 20, 1972: “the individual private psyche, the human ‘self’, is itself an artifact.”
  6. See  Percepts of existence. The etymology of ‘threshold’ is obscure but may be taken to have come from ‘thresh‘, in the sense of ‘to tread’, and from ‘hold‘, in the sense of a ‘refuge’ or ‘keep’ (household, hold of a ship, etc).  So: ‘a step into or from a protected place’, a ‘doorstep’.

Effects before causes

Marchand, The Medium and the Messenger:

There were times when McLuhan felt proud that he had been an intellectual pioneer, almost the first person in the West since Plato, as he sometimes put it, to study effects rather than to talk about causes. (278)

McLuhan was overstating the case, of course.  Gilson and Muller-Tyme had taught him how important this method was to Augustine and to Christian philosophy generally. But the claim gives good measure of the importance within McLuhan’s work of this sort of investigation. In the sciences it is comparable to a chemist recommending close attention to the workings of particular material reactions in order to illuminate the table of elements. Or to a physicist attempting to define a law through concrete observations of, say, the path of a planet. But in the humanities, far more consequentially, it is the one way around nihilism.

Added April 30, 2023: In the 1940s McLuhan had the idea from Poe and Eliot that the artist must start with the effect she wants to achieve with an artwork and then figure out the steps leading to that effect. Those steps would be the artwork as an intro-duction to the desired effect. Or of the sparking of it. Later he realized that this idea could be turned around with the aim of achieving another effect rather than the starting one. For example, if nihilism were taken as an effect, or war, or social discord, or despair, figuring out the steps leading to that effect could expose how to avoid it by changing those steps. This notion that all problems are achieved effects that are avoidable once they are investigated as effects is one of the important aspects of of McLuhan’s faith:

One of the advantages of being a Catholic is that it confers a complete intellectual freedom to examine any and all phenomena with the absolute assurance of their intelligibility. (McLuhan to Martin Esslin, September 23, 1971, Letters 440)

 

 

 

The incomprehensible mechanism

Poe’s story (if that is what it is), ‘The Premature Burial’ (1844), rehearses the action of ‘Descent into the Maelstrom’ (1841) in another medium, earth rather than sea:

To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality. That it has frequently, very frequently, so fallen will scarcely be denied by those who think. The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins? We know that there are diseases in which occur total cessations of all the apparent functions of vitality, and yet in which these cessations are merely suspensions, properly so called. They are only temporary pauses in the incomprehensible mechanism. A certain period elapses, and some unseen mysterious principle again sets in motion the magic pinions and the wizard wheels. The silver cord was not for ever loosed, nor the golden bowl irreparably broken. But where, meantime, was the soul?

just where and when (“a certain period”) are “the boundaries which divide Life from Death”? And what occurs to the soul, ‘there’ and ‘then’, between identities, or between identity and its annihilation? Poe’s wonderfully formulated suggestion is that such trans-formation is the working of an “incomprehensible mechanism”:

some unseen mysterious principle again sets in motion the magic pinions and the wizard wheels. The silver cord was not for ever loosed, nor the golden bowl irreparably broken.

This process of metamorphosis is the precondition of rebirth, psychological or otherwise.  ‘The Premature Burial’ concludes:

My soul acquired tone — acquired temper. I went abroad. I took vigorous exercise. I breathed the free air of Heaven. I thought upon other subjects than Death. I discarded my medical books. “Buchan” I burned.1 I read no “Night Thoughts” — no fustian [speech] about churchyards — no bugaboo tales —such as this2.  In short, I became a new man, and lived a man’s life.

 

 

  1.  “Buchan” has not definitively been identified. Candidates include William Buchan (1729-1805), author of a popular medical book, and Peter Buchan (1790-1854), a collector of dark tales. See The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition. Night Thoughts is the famous book of Edward Young (1683-1765).
  2.  Poe’s genial self-reference within his own “bugaboo tale” — “such as this” — also functions to describe the metamorphosis at stake in it as an “incomprehensible” flip in awareness.

The humble ditch

The humble ditch gleams brighter than a hoard. (Vincent van Gogh citing a Jules Breton poem)1

Breton’s sentence, particularly as cited in 1884 by van Gogh (1853-1890), captures a number of McLuhan’s themes at once: the gap where the action is, the hidden processes of the present, the unperceived transitive water or footbridge, the function of artistic creation, the dialogue of the light and dark, “light through” toward us rather than “light on” from us, etc.

  1. Van Gogh in a March 1884 letter to Anthon van Rappard. Cf, van Gogh’s drawings and paintings, The Ditch (1873), Footbridge Across a Ditch (1883), The Ditch (1884), Garden of the Asylum (1889).

The family predicament

McLuhan talking in ‘A Matter of Faith‘, a 1972 interview with Fr Patrick Peyton:

It’s perfectly obvious that the family has been ripped off, as it were. In our kind of world the extreme mobility of the hardware components of the world around it have destroyed the  community in which the family normally is embedded. The matrix of the family, the  community, has been ripped off by new instruments of transportation which simply eliminate the neighborliness and the natural rapport that men have with one another by proximity and daily dialogue and familiarity. It is the daily dialogue and familiarity that has been ripped off by rapid transport so that people now go as quickly to Berlin (…) or to Moscow (…) as formerly they made a short journey (…) Now this has temporarily, at least, destroyed what we call community and so the family is left isolated — the nuclear family [today is] stark naked, unsupported by community. Now a family in which you have no [surrounding] community is naturally one that is put under a terrible stress. If only the members of the family are there to constitute community and neighborliness this is surely [only the] bare bones [of  community] and it’s a pretty stark situation.

And in 1974:

In a world of perpetual motion and high mobility there can be no meaningful community, since by definition, all we really have in common is the mobility; and the one thing we depend upon is change. The mobility itself is inseparable from our new affluent technologies which demand that we become their servo-mechanisms.  (Foreword to Abortion in Perspective)

Lionizing and de-lionizing McLuhan

In the mid 1960s, when McLuhan began to be lionized in the US (giving license to Canadians to do so in train), the understanding was that he was a conservative capitalist who provided highfalutin thoughts on the great virtues of modern technology.  Television and electric media generally were — the new God.    

But then it turned out that McLuhan saw capitalism as the private rip-off of public goods and the new media as potentially enslaving and as certainly destructive of individual and social identity.1 

Once this other side of McLuhan’s thought became known, he had to be exposed as a fraud and an idiot.2 Even worse, as a Catholic even! The press and the academy were duly organized to this end and the required result was soon obtained, first in the US and then, ever taking its cue, in Canada as well.  McLuhan became an embarrassment.

McLuhan is usually considered as a student of the media.  But his career may as usefully be  studied as an object of manipulation3 by that rabid merger of media and intelligentsia that has torn off its mask today to reveal its monstrous power and terrible intent. 

 

  1. Cf, Take Today, 41: “From tribal brotherhood to universal otherhood — Benjamin Nelson, Idea of Usury59-60: “Brooks Adams in 1896 produced his classic study of the effect of acceleration on social institutions: ‘Nothing so portentous overhangs humanity as this mysterious and relentless acceleration of movement, which changes methods of competition and alters paths of trade; for by it countless millions of men and women are foredoomed to happiness or misery, as certainly as the beasts and trees, which have flourished in the wilderness, are destined to vanish when the soil is subdued by man.’ — The Law of Civilization and Decay”
  2. This effort continues unabated to this day. The bite of McLuhan’s insight into the modern world is such that there continues to be a good market for its discounting.  ‘How to Become a Famous Media Scholar: The Case of Marshall McLuhan‘ by Jefferson Pooley (associate professor of media and communication at Muhlenberg College) is an outstanding contemporary example of such exposure: McLuhan as a media creation, McLuhan as a reactionary, McLuhan as “Panglossian seer”, McLuhan as “pious agrarian”, McLuhan as “media mystagogue”, McLuhan as “cultural pessimist”, McLuhan as self-contradictory, McLuhan as nostalgic for tribalism, McLuhan as pentacostal, McLuhan as “truth-indifferent”, McLuhan as “schizophrenic”, etc etc. There is little Pooley fails to throw against the wall to see what will stick.
  3. Pooley notes with some truth: “In some ways, though, McLuhan was more a product of the media culture than its student.”  But what Pooley thinks we find in this “product of the media culture” is, somehow, “the man” himself!  More, this is the man himself as a media manipulator! Pooley is able to reach this bizarre conclusion because he holds, as a convinced Gutenbergian, directly contra McLuhan (and contra all the great moderns championed by McLuhan from Poe to Joyce), that the media environment is subject to individual control. McLuhan as a “product of the media culture” is immediately thereafter said to have “seduced Esquire and the ad men (and later Wired) because what he had to say resonated with Americans already primed for the good news about technology.” And exactly therefore (as Pooley ends his screed another sentence later): “the man (…) is more instructive than his books.” Where McLuhan, like Poe’s mariner in the Maelstrom, investigated the depths of the media sea to learn how it was that Americans are “already primed”, Pooley would direct our interest to the hero with a thousand faces making his way over that sea’s surface — a sort of Captain Cook of the media.

Percepts of existence

if the external world is attuned to the mind of man, then the whole of Nature is a language and the poet is a pontifex or bridger between the two worlds. He conducts the symphony of mind and nature. (…) The poet here is exercising his priestly powers of purifying the wells of existence, exerting his primary imagination which is the agent of all perception, not the secondary imagination which brings art into existence as an echo of the functions of perception.1 (Coleridge As Artist, 1957)

I am myself quite aware that there is a great contrast between perceptual and conceptual confrontation; and I think that the “death of Christianity” or the “death of God” occurs the moment they [Christianity/God] become concept. As long as they remain percept, directly involving the perceiver, they are alive. (Electric Consciousness and The Church, 1970)

The idealists share with the experienced and practical men of their time the infirmity of substituting concepts for percepts. Both concentrate on a clash between past experience and future goals that black out the usual but hidden processes of the present. Both ignore the fact that dialogue as a process of creating the new came before, and goes beyond, the exchange of “equivalents” that merely reflect or repeat the old.2 (Take Today, 1972. 22)

Percepts of existence always lie behind concepts of nature. (The Argument: Causality in the Electric World, 1973)3

Effects Are Perceived Whereas Causes Are Conceived (The Argument: Causality in the Electric World, 1973)4  

The effects come first, and the fact of the effects coming first indicates that the study of environmental action, or the action of the [Mael]strom, must begin with the effects rather than with a theoretic pursuit of causes. The effects are percepts, and the causes tend to be concepts. (Art as Survival in the Electric Age, 1973)

“Percepts of existence” is a subjective genitive5 (where percepts belong first of all to existence), not an objective genitive (where existence would belong to percepts as their achieved/assembled/certified/manipulated/conceptualized object).

Hence, since existence is our ground, and since existence is originally fractured as6 primordial percepts, we belong first of all to percepts, not them to us.

The qualification “first of all” is required because the mystery (“the main question“) lies in the fact that the subjective genitive in “percepts of existence” comes to be an objective genitive. The subjectivity of existence (gen. subj.) comes to be taken over by an objectivity.  And this objectivity seems to belong to us, not to it — since it, existence, comes to be the object of our conceptualization.

But what if even, or especially, this hand-over belonged (and indeed belongs) first of all to it? To an “incomprehensible” kenosis?

 

  1. “Primary” here must be taken in terms of rank (ie, of fundamentality), but also in terms of time. For a sound comes first or is “primary” and its “echo” is “secondary”.  So in experience, perception is always first (although this is usually blacked out and unknown) and what we make on this basis, from conceptions to bed-frames to artworks, always second.
  2. “Dialogue” is both one percept on the spectrum of percepts and the prerequisite for consciousness of the katabasis that perpetually recurs to that spectrum. What comes first and what comes second here is knotted: “dialogue” must be known in order to come to know “dialogue”. This knot in time constitutes a labyrinth which must be threaded as the initial step into the terra incognita McLuhan attempted to introduce and explore.
  3. This passage in ‘The Argument: Causality in the Electric World’ continues: ‘Their hidden hang-up was the visual bias of all “objectivity,” whether “materialist” or “idealist.” They also ignored the acoustic “message of the birds” — the output of any process, biological or psychic, always differs qualitatively from the input. There are no “through-puts” or connections between processes but only gaps or interfaces for “keeping in touch” with “where the action is.” When the “play” between the wheel and the axle ends, so does the wheel. While the “subjectivist” puts on the world as his own clothes, the “objectivist” supposes that he can stand naked “out of this world.” The ideal of the rationalist philosophers still persists: to achieve an inclusive “science of the sciences.” But such a “science” would be a monster of preconceived figures minus un-perceived grounds. No “objective” dialectics of Nature or of science as visually ex-plainable can stand up to a resonant interface with the existential. For “testing the truth” is not merely matching by congruence or classification; it is making sense out of the totality of experience — a process of pattern re-cognition that requires not only concepts but active perception by all the senses. Today, as “hardware” is transmuted into pure information by the process of “etherealization,” the “inner” and the “outer” merge — thinking becomes doing.’
  4. This further passage in ‘The Argument: Causality in the Electric World’ continues: ‘Unable to explore actual processes perceptually from every side, the conceptual man apprehends only visual goals. For example, the conventional ideas of “evolution” and “technology” are illusions engendered by the visual bias of literate cultures. Such cultures translated the “chain of being” metaphor from the astral to the biological plane. For the use of the missing link” idea we are indebted to a missing inventor. So far nobody has appeared as originator of this phrase. The gap created by the “missing link” has sparked more exploration and discovery than the established links in “connected” science. Conceptual choices, like “natural selection,” can come only after the fact. The “origins” of all species vanish in rear-view perspectives, while the music goes round and round.’
  5.  A subjective genitive like ‘the ball of the boy’. An objective genitive, in contrast, may be seen in ‘the boy’s ball’.
  6. ‘As’ not ‘into’, since ‘into’ might be taken to imply a chronological sequence of, first, existence, and then, sometime later, its fracture into percepts. Instead, existence is primordially fractured and these fractions may be called percepts.

A sense of reality

Camp is popular because it gives people a sense of reality to see a replay1 of their lives. (…) People need old lives2 to make their young lives real…3

  1. McLuhan often emphasized the importance of “replay” as “recognition” and “retrieval”.  Here it has the opposite value of preventing “recognition” and “retrieval”.  The differences between these values turn on the presence or absence of “dialogue as a process of creating the new” that does not “merely reflect or repeat the old” (Take Today, 22).
  2. “Old lives” as giving “a sense of reality” provides an interesting ontological twist to the “rear-view mirror”.
  3. Linda Sandler, ‘Interview With Marshall McLuhan: His Outrageous Views About Women’,Miss Chatelaine magazine, September 3, 1974). Some further observations from the same interview: “Escaping into another time or space is a form of indulgence — like licking a candy bar. I’m not sure there should be any law against it. I don’t think people should be deep and profound — my gosh!  who wants even to hear such people?”; “Men (as opposed to women) have no imagination (…) (they have taken) early retirement for sagging psyches”.

The Maelstrom in Mallarmé’s Coup de Dés

The Symbolists long ago, and Yeats, Joyce, Pound, Eliot in this century, spent their entire lives expounding the aesthetics of the resonant intervals of acoustic space. The same resonant intervals have become the basis of modern quantum mechanics.The major factor is that the interval is where the action is. (McLuhan to Barbara Ward, February 8, 1973, Letters 466, emphasis in the original)

When McLuhan came to read Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés (1897) in the late 1940s, he must have been struck to find that one prism in its assemblage of prisms reflected, or refracted, Poe’s ‘Descent into the Maelstrom’ (1841).1 For McLuhan had been deeply engaged with Poe at least since 1943 (but he had begun to read Poe’s stories a full decade before this on his way to England with Tom Easterbrook in 1932) and had published an essay on ‘Edgar Poe’s Tradition’ in 1944. Then in 1946 he began that series of descriptions and prescriptions of the Maelstrom that he would continue unabated for the rest of his life:

The sailor in his story The Maelstrom is at first paralyzed with horror. But in his very paralysis there is another fascination which emerges, a power of detached observation which becomes a “scientific” interest in the action of the strom. And this provides the means of escape. (Footprints in the Sands of Crime, 1946)

Mallarmé’s poem (if that is what it is) situates itself (if situation is even possible in “this region of vagueness, in which all reality dissolves”)2 in the abyss of a shipwreck at the moment of “detached” (McLuhan) “vertigo” (Mallarmé) when its “master” (Poe’s mariner) is between “vessels” (“the man without a vessel”). This is “the moment of striking”, like the striking of a spark, through which some or other particular form of experience is to be actualized out of the “original foam” or spectrum array of its possibilities. Hence it is a moment “beyond former calculations” (defining “the old man”) but that is “not yet some [further] account”. 

This is a time aside from chronological time that unaccountably “hesitates” and so provides a kind of freeze-frame portrait of “THE ETERNAL CIRCUMSTANCE” of the exposure of the master’s “childlike3 shade” or “immemorial ulterior demon” to “the virgin index” of possibilities (“in sight of all non-existent human outcomes”, the “non-existent regions” of “AS IF” constituting the un-decided “neutrality of [the] abyss”). These formal seeds may be imagined as the flotsam and jetsam circling within the Maelstrom’s “worldpool”, some one of which Mallarmé’s “master”, like Poe’s mariner and his brother (and, indeed, everyone) must forever, over and over again, ‘select’, or somehow originate, as the momentary “vessel” of their eternally forthcoming experience.4

This is the ‘story’ (although exactly not a chronological one, not linear ‘history’) of “the memorable crisis where the event matured, accomplished in sight of all non-existent human outcomes“. But this singular “event” is one that is “accomplished” over and over again in (or to) all human experience such that it is the “ETERNAL CIRCUMSTANCE” by which precisely “NOTHING (…) WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE (…) BUT THE PLACE”.  That is, nothing itself, the synchronic gap or interval between particular vessels of experience, as an original creative force before experience, unaccountably activates itself (or ‘takes place’) and the result is — some “place”, some “CONSTELLATION”, some orientation, like “North”. In the midst of this synchronic way humans eternally reenact the original creation where, too, “NOTHING (…) WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE (…) BUT THE PLACE”.

THE ETERNAL CIRCUMSTANCE OF A SHIPWRECK’S DEPTH (…) the Abyss raging (…) beneath the desperately sloping incline (…) falling (…) the surges, gathered far within the shadow buried deep by (…) its yawning depth (…) rocked from side to side (…) THE MASTER, beyond former calculations, where the lost manoeuvre (…) that formerly (…) grasped the helm (…) hesitates, a corpse pushed back by the arm from the secret5, rather than taking sides6, a hoary madman, on behalf of the waves: one [wave] overwhelms the head, flows through the submissive beard (…) of the man without a vessel, empty (…) a legacy, in vanishing, to someone ambiguous, the immemorial ulterior demon having, from non-existent regions, led the old man towards this ultimate meeting with probability, this his childlike shade caressed and smoothed and rendered supple by the wave (…) the sea through the old man or the old man against the sea, making a vain attempt, an Engagement whose dread the veil of illusion rejected, as the phantom of a gesture will tremble, collapse, madness, WILL NEVER ABOLISH (…) AS IF
A simple insinuation into silence (…) the mystery hurled, howled, in some close swirl (…) whirls round the abyss without scattering or dispersing and cradles the virgin index there [of] AS IF (…) that IF the lucid and lordly crest of vertigo on the invisible brow sparkles, then shades, a slim dark tallness, upright in its siren coiling, at the moment of striking, through impatient ultimate scales (…) that imposed limits on the infinite (…) rhythmic suspense of the disaster, to bury itself in the original foam, from which its delirium formerly leapt to the summit faded by the same neutrality of abyss (…) NOTHING of the memorable crisis [gen subj!] where the event matured, accomplished in sight of all non-existent human outcomes, WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE a commonplace elevation pours out [of] absence BUT THE PLACE some lapping below, as if to scatter the empty act abruptly, that otherwise by its falsity would have plumbed perdition, in this region of vagueness, in which all reality dissolves (…)7

These excerpts comprise over half of the text. Another substantial prism-theme has to do with what occurs at this juncture of “un Coup de Dés“. A de-cision is made (such as Poe’s mariner’s decision to abandon ship and entrust himself to a barrel) that is at once uncertain as regards its provenance (the mariner’s brother can’t understand it) and its viability, but also certain as regards its specific shape: “that imposed limits on the infinite”. The “throw of the dice” is such a “meeting with probability” that cannot hope to “abolish hazard” or “chance”; but at the same time occasions some “unique Number which cannot be another”, “a final account in formation”, “A CONSTELLATION”:

EXCEPT at the altitude PERHAPS, as far as a place fuses with, beyond, outside (…) through such declination8 of fire (…) towards what must be the Wain also North A CONSTELLATION (…) a final account in formation (…) stopping at some last point that (…) expresses a Throw of the Dice [Un Coup de Dés].

As Gilson noted in his 1930 Augustine essay: “by the very act of choosing the way he considered best he precluded himself from at the same time following another”.9 Similarly in McLuhan’s Nashe thesis: “the history of the trivium is largely a history of the rivalry among [the three arts] for ascendancy” such that “in any study of the history of the trivium it is unavoidable that one adopts the point of view of one of these arts”.

Human beings always act and experience on the basis of some orientation (“the Wain also North A CONSTELLATION”), but an orientation singular is not given.  Instead there are orientations, plural, and both the art and science of the 20th century came to interrogate how de-cision is made between them (or has always already been made between them), at the prior level of AS IF possibility (although to the normal mode or “vessel” of experience such questioning could only seem to be a shipwreck). And the great question was, and is, how such achieved singularity out of pluripotent ground might or might not be compatible with meaning.

 

  1. Following Baudelaire’s intense engagement with Poe, Mallarmé published his sonnet, Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe, in 1876, and his translations of Poe’s collected poems (Les Poèmes d’Edgar Poe) in 1888.
  2. Quotations from Mallarmé’s Coup de Dés in this and the following two paragraphs come from the extensive excerpt from the poem given immediately after them.
  3. “Childlike” because ‘hesitating’ before possibilities yet to be actualized (or not): “someone ambiguous”.
  4. McLuhan’s unpublished manuscript on ‘The Little Epic’ from the later 1950s: “Language itself and every department of human activity would in this view be a long succession of ‘momentary deities’ or epiphanies.  And such indeed is the view put forward in the Cratylus of Plato: I believe, Socrates, the true account of the matter to be, that a power more than human gave things their first names, and that the names which are thus given are necessarily their true names. In this way etymology becomes a method of science and theology. William Wordsworth called these momentary deities ‘spots of time’, Hopkins called them ‘inscapes’ and Browning built his entire work on the same concept of the esthetic of the ‘eternal moment’.”
  5. “A corpse pushed back by the arm (of the vortex) from the secret”: a “corpse” because “a legacy, in vanishing” and not yet some “final account in formation” that would expose “the secret” of either the “plumbed perdition” below or the “commonplace elevation” above.
  6. Ditto.
  7. Translation by A.S. Kline (underlining emphasis added).
  8. Regarding altitude/declination, see note 4 above. McLuhan doubtless read Coup de Dés against the background of Eliot’s Four Quartets, one of whose epigrams is Heraclitus’ ‘odos ano kato
  9. ‘The Future Of Augustinian Metaphysics’, A Monument To Saint Augustine, 1930, 287-315.

Effect before cause in Gilson

Mallarmé (…) saw that a poetry of effects was impersonal. The author effaced himself above all in not assigning causes or explanations as transitional devices of a novelistic and a pseudo-rationalistic type between the parts of a poem. (Mr. Eliot’s Historical Decorum, 1949) 

When a new environment forms, we see the old one as if we lived in a world of the déjà vu. (…) Yet this strategy merely ensures that whenever we encounter the unfamiliar, we will translate it into something we already know. It is this that seems to make the present almost impossible to apprehend in any period or culture. It was James Joyce in Finnegans Wake who demonstrated that the way to overcome the fear of the present, and of innovation in general, is to make an inventory of all the effects of the new thing as it encounters all the older forms of the society. (The Future of Morality: inner vs outer quest, 1967)

It was the symbolist poets who began the study of effects minus causes. This is a technique indispensable to the developing of perception and the by-passing of concepts. (McLuhan to Jim Davey, March 22, 1971)

the discovery of the “technique of discovery” (…) is [to learn how] to trace a process backward from its ultimate effect to the point at which to begin to produce that effect, i.e., to invent the market before the product. This was the discovery of Poe in detective fiction, and Baudelaire in poetry. (Take Today, 195)

This putting the effect before the cause is what we do typically and ordinarily in the electric time.  In 1844, at about the same time that [Georg Cantor, 1845-1918],1 the mathematician, invented set theory by separating the mathematical operations from mathematical quantities, Edgar Allan Poe, the great innovator in the arts, separated the poetic process from poetry. This was his great breakthrough, and it was of instant effect on the French symbolists and the French poetic activity of the period. Baudelaire translated Poe (…) and took on this idea of simultaneity that if you want to write a poem you have to start with the effect and then look around for the causes. And this became the awareness of acoustic space in which the beginning and the end are at the same time. This is the kind of space and time in which we live now. Einstein was only catching up with Poe in the twentieth century when he invented space-time or relativity theory. The poets and the artists are usually fifty years ahead of the physical scientists in devising models of perception. The job of the artist is to devise means of perceiving that are relevant to the situation in which you exist. This is the gap between biology and technology… (Art as Survival in the Electric Age, 1973)

Poe hit upon the key to the electric age, programming from effects in order to anticipate causes. (Art as Survival in the Electric Age, 1973)

I begin with effects and work round to the causes, whereas the conventional pattern is to start with a somewhat arbitrary selection of ‘causes’ and then try to match these with some of the effects. It is this haphazard matching process that leads to fragmentary
superficiality. (McLuhan to Franklin R Gannon, June 12, 1973, Letters 478)

converts come in through the back door of the church. Coming in through the back door is coming in through the effects of the church, and not through its teachings. (McLuhan to Nina Sutton, 1975)

In the late 1940s a series of influences suddenly coalesced for McLuhan into a position he would continue to articulate for the remaining thirty years of his life.  This coalescence amounted to his second conversion. The central notion was that everything experienced in human life and culture is contingent effect, never cause — but that contingent effect indirectly suggests cause (via induction and making, not deduction and matching).

In the order of their work on (working over) McLuhan, these influences were: T.S. Eliot’s lectures and essays and especially his Four Quartets which appeared sequentially in the late 1930s and early 1940s; the many books and essays of Etienne Gilson from the 1920s and 1930s2; the work of Sigfried Giedion and Wyndham Lewis, both of whom McLuhan met in 1943; Edgar Poe’s ‘Descent into the Maelstrom’ (1841) and ‘Philosophy of Composition’ (1846); Cleanth Brooks’ poem on the Maelstrom explicitly correlating it with times plural (written in 1944 and published in 1946)3; the poems and essays of Stéphane  Mallarmé (1842-1898); the essays and poetry of Ezra Pound; and the novels of James Joyce (which McLuhan reread in the late 1940s).4

When in 1938 Bernard Muller-Thym returned with his PhD from the University of Toronto to St Louis University to teach in the philosophy department, he and McLuhan rapidly became close friends. Muller-Thym would be the best man at McLuhan’s marriage in 1939 and the Godfather of McLuhan’s first two children, Eric (b 1942) and Mary (b 1944 with twin Teri). In Toronto Muller-Thym had been Etienne Gilson’s favorite student and in turn passed on his knowledge of Gilson’s work to McLuhan. The years Muller-Thym and McLuhan spent together in St Louis (before Muller-Thym enlisted in the navy in 1942) amounted in this way to a master class in Gilson’s thought conducted by Muller-Thym for McLuhan. As is especially evident once the editor’s additions to McLuhan’s own bibliography are discounted, Gilson would became by far the most cited reference in McLuhan’s PhD thesis on Nashe, which was submitted and approved in 1943. 

Gilson’s teaching on the chronological5 and phenomenological precedence of effect to cause is especially treated in his 1930 essay, ‘The Future Of Augustinian Metaphysics’:6 

The fact on which [Augustine] fastened as the witness in ourselves of the existence of God was the true judgement. His analysis, often repeated, of the characteristics (…) which formally define truth as such, is well known; the antinomy between the contingency of the subject as the vehicle of truth on the one side, and the necessity of truth itself, whatever  its object, on the other, can only be solved by the admission of a subsistent truth [or medium] (297)

For the Augustinian proof to have its full effect, it is necessary that, somehow or other, the human intellect, which conceives the truth [in the sciences, but also in everyday understanding of language and the environment], should not be the immediate sufficient cause of its truth;7 if it is, there is no necessity for it to affirm the existence of God as cause, and then the way opening [to God] through thought is blocked at the very entrance. Doubtless there would remain the search for God in the order of causality, as cause of the intellect itself (which Albert the Great was to attempt), but St. Augustine does not even try this, because the only operation of the intellect which requires the affirmation of God as its sufficient reason is the [existence]8 of truth. He has, therefore, always to come back to the true judgement, or, what comes to the same thing, the intellect, so far as it is capable of conceiving truth. (298)

if (…) this is the point on which his proof rests, it must necessarily follow that Divine illumination (to give it its traditional name) must reach thought directly [as productive cause, but known as direct cause only indirectly through effect]. For either it reaches it directly and in that case we grasp at the same time the sufficient reason of truth and God who is its foundation; or it reaches it indirectly, and in that case we are equally incapable of attaining to the existence of God and of accounting for truth [since in this case these would depend from the recognition bestowed upon them by our contingency]. (298-299)

To say that “we know in God”, or that we see His hidden light,9 is this not tantamount to inviting the metaphysician in search of a mystical intuitionism to treat God as the very light of our thought, as the natural and first object of this thought, so that, instead of knowing Him through things, we know things through Him? This deviation begins from the end of the twelfth century onwards, under the influence of Arabic neo-Platonism, and especially of Avicenna; [although] dammed in by the efforts of St, Bonaventura and of St. Thomas Aquinas, it spreads in the seventeenth century with Malebranche, thanks to the influence
of Cartesian idealism, and reaches its height in the nineteenth century under the impulse of German idealism. (299)

In proportion as the teaching of St. Augustine aimed at being a metaphysic, it is a metaphysic based upon a psychological empiricism, or, if preferred, a metaphysic of inner experience. Hence its extreme suppleness, its power of rebirth, and the very incompleteness which left a permanent possibility of progress open before it. (302-303)

The important point before all else is to understand that the two philosophies [Augustinian and Cartesian] have no essential relation (…) What is, for the French philosopher, but the initial step in a regulated order of thoughts is for St. Augustine a concrete and painful experience, an illness from which he has suffered and of which he has cured himself.(…) si fallor sum (301, 303)

Assuming (…) St. Augustine’s method is as we have described it, what do we find as the necessary starting-point of our search? Facts, and nothing but facts. These facts may be, and often are, facts of inner experience, they may be ideas — but ideas taken not as principles of deduction, but as the basis of induction. The problem of the existence of God enjoys no privileged position in his teaching. It is, indeed, a unique case in respect of the reality at stake and consequently  also in respect of the nature of the datum which allows us to attain to it, but this datum differs from other data only in content, not in nature. Like being, like life, like sensation, like thought, truth is a fact; like other facts, it is presented to our empirical observation; like other empirical  observations, it demands of metaphysics the discovery of its sufficient reason; and if God alone can furnish its sufficient reason, we shall have proved the existence of God. Nothing here ever leaves the strictly philosophical order to pass over into mystical intuition and to substitute it for philosophical thought. (305-306)

Every ontological interpretation of St. Augustine presupposes, then, a more or less complete misunderstanding of his radical empiricism. (…) The primum cognitum of St. Augustine is not God; it is man within the universe, and, within this universe and this man, the experience of a true judgement. But it must be added that this primum cognitum is not (…) the primum reale; on the contrary, it [the primum cognitum] becomes intelligible only on condition of finding its sufficient reason in a transcendent fact which provides its explanation.  (306)

St. Augustine starts from a complex cognitum in which he distinguishes by analysis an order of reality which postulates in its turn that of the First Being. Once this Being is apprehended and posited, it becomes possible to set off into an order which is not that of deduction, but rather of production; and even then it must be remembered that the start is taken not from a principle, but from the consequence, since we ourselves are only a consequence (…) the doctrine of divine illumination is not the vision of the First Cause, but the induction of the First Cause, starting from an effect, namely [the fact of our knowledge of] truth. (306-307)

The congenital impotence of our intellectual light to apprehend truth, a correlative impotence of our will to compass the good until truth and goodness are accepted as the gifts of God, instead of being conquered like the spoils of the victor, had been St. Augustine’s experience…10 (307)

to be Christian qua philosophy, a philosophy must be Augustinian or nothing. His metaphysic of nature completes a metaphysic of grace, because nature is given to the Christian in grace, which, working in him inwardly, manifests itself there in the manner of a cause
revealed by its effects. (308)

It is in no case possible for man to start from God to deduce from Him the creature; on the contrary, he must mount from the creature to God. The course recommended by St. Augustine — and herein lies his personal contribution to the treasure of tradition — is the path to God, leading through this particular creature which is man, and in man, thought, and in thought, truth. But this means, quite beyond  speculations about the nature of truth and its metaphysical  conditions, a sort of moral dialectic that, taking as object of its search the search itself by man of God, endeavours to show the presence in the heart of man of a contingency… (312)

that secret door behind which God stands. (313)

a renewed Augustinianism (…) would have to become assimilative and creative (…) it will so become, once it realizes that its function is to do well what has been badly done by modern idealism, to re-establish it on the foundations of a psychological realism which is its natural basis…  (314)

In a word11, “that secret door behind which God stands” is the utter finitude and contingency of everything human — a finitude and contingency that is yet somehow capable of communication and of learning truth.  These capabilities taken as effects or contingencies are, once intensely interrogated, revelatory of what is before them as cause — and so makes them possible in a kind of knotted feedback-feedforward action.

This is, of course, circular — from what is later, what is earlier is induced.  But being subject to this circularity is just what human being is.

  1. McLuhan has ‘Gould’ here, but it was Cantor who “invented set theory”. Perhaps McLuhan had discussed Cantor with his friend Glenn Gould at some point? Slips like this were common in McLuhan’s work but he rarely bothered to correct them.
  2. In a strange and humorous reversal of roles, McLuhan undertook, 30 years later, to instruct Gilson on effects: “Symbolism starts with effects and goes sleuthing after causes” (McLuhan to Gilson, January 19, 1971, Letters 420).
  3. Since Brooks and McLuhan were in close contact at this time, it may well be that McLuhan knew of the poem before it was published.
  4. Of course, many of these influences had been greatly influenced themselves by some of the others: Mallarmé, Eliot, Pound and Brooks by Poe; Eliot, Pound and Joyce by Mallarmé.
  5. But what is ‘the’ chronological? See McLuhan’s times.
  6. In A Monument To Saint Augustine, 1930, 287-315. All emphasis in the citations has been added.
  7. A fundamental problem with most discussions of McLuhan and art is that this insight is ignored. The ground of an artwork cannot be the artist without raising the question of the ground of the artist. As Nietzsche pointed out, abolishing the ‘true world’ abolishes the ‘apparent world’ along with it.
  8. Gilson’s translated text here has ‘conception’, which is not false, but which introduces unnecessary complications. As Gilson says in the very next sentence: “(Augustine) has, therefore, always to come back to the true judgement, or, what comes to the same thing, the intellect, so far as it is capable of conceiving  truth.”
  9. Gilson frequently recurs to “Divine illumination” and “the very light of our thought” in these passages. In McLuhan this notion is often termed ‘light through’ toward us as opposed to ‘light on’ from us.
  10. See note 7 above.
  11. ‘In a word’ — as McLuhan sometimes said, following Muller-Thym’s frequent habit.

Easterbrook in Toronto

W.T. (Tom) Easterbrook graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1933, the same year as McLuhan. He then went on to graduate school at UT in political economics where he obtained his MA in 1935 and his PhD in 1938.  He began teaching at Brandon that same year. In 1941, he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and spent the year of 1942 studying, presumably at UT. In 1943 he came back to Manitoba, but not to Brandon College — he taught at the University of Manitoba until 1946.

In 1947 he returned to UT where he eventually became the head of the political economy department like his teacher, thesis adviser, colleague and friend, Harold Innis.

In 1941 his career to that point was recorded in the Guggenheim Foundation’s Report for 1941–42 as follows:

Appointed from Canada:
EASTERBROOK, WILLIAM THOMAS:  Appointed for studies in the economic history of the Pacific Northwest; tenure, twelve months from July 1, 1941.

Born December 4, 1907, at Winnipeg, Canada.  Education:  University of Manitoba, B.A., 1933; University of Toronto, M.A., 1935, Ph.D., 1938 (Royal Bank Economics Fellow, 1933–34; Alexander Mackenzie Fellow, 1934–35; Maurice Cody Fellow, 1935–36); Harvard University, 1936–37 (Harvard University Fellow).
Assistant in Economics, 1937–38, University of Toronto.
Lecturer in Economics, 1938–40, Assistant Professor, 1940—, Brandon College of the University of Manitoba.
Publications:  Farm Credit in Canada1, 1938.
Articles in Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, Encyclopedia of Canada.

In the decade between his graduate work at UT and the beginning of his teaching career there, Easterbrook returned as a visiting lecturer for a year in the early 1940’s in connection with his Guggenheim:

Innis supported [Henry] Cody‘s2 program of developing graduate studies at Toronto with a proposal of his own. He was anxious to bring young professors in the social sciences from other Canadian universities to Toronto on one- or two-year stints. He argued that many of them had been struggling during the Depression with large classes and low salaries. They would benefit by a “relaxed” period (with a light teaching load) at Toronto. After becoming familiar with the Toronto system, they would return home and organize their classes along the lines of Toronto’s, using the same textbooks. In due course they would be sending graduate students to Toronto. Cody approved of the proposal and the result was a series of visits from young professors from western universities: W.T. Easterbrook (…) and others. (Donald Campbell Masters, Henry John Cody: An Outstanding Life, 1995, 208)

 

  1. This was Easterbrook’s PhD Thesis.  Innis arranged its publication by UTP and wrote an introduction to it.
  2. Canon Henry J Cody was the president of the University of Toronto from 1932 to 1945 and its chancellor from 1944 to 1947.

Echoes of Joyce

the way of escape from the dangers of excessive spiritual isolation was through wholehearted participation in the great stream of human experience and endeavor. (‘Introduction’, Tennyson: Selected Poetry, 1955, vii)

He was passing at that moment before the jesuit house in Gardiner Street and wondered vaguely which window would be his if he ever joined the order. Then he wondered at the vagueness of his wonder, at the remoteness of his own soul from what he had hitherto imagined her sanctuary, at the frail hold which so many years of order and obedience had of him when once a definite and irrevocable act of his threatened to end for ever, in time and in eternity, his freedom. The voice of the director urging upon him the proud claims of the church and the mystery and power of the priestly office repeated itself idly in his memory. His soul was not there to hear and greet it and he knew now that the exhortation [to join the jesuit order] he had listened to had already fallen into an idle formal tale. He would never swing the thurible before the tabernacle as priest. His destiny was to be elusive of social or religious orders. The wisdom of the priest’s appeal did not touch him to the quick. He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world. (…) He crossed the bridge over the stream… (Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Chapter 4)

Perhaps because he was not a cradle Catholic and because Canada was not a Catholic country like Ireland, McLuhan did not feel the same tension between freedom and catholicism that Joyce did. However, five of his six children did.  And McLuhan understood this, both in Joyce and in his kids. His resolution of the tension was, while respecting the forms of contemporary catholicism (as only partially true like all things finite, but yet partially and importantly true), to criticize the Gutenbergian heritage of the church and the Gutenbergian assumptions of many of its parishioners and clerisy.  But, at the same time, to contribute to a scientific understanding of human experience in which the possibility of belief and the possibility of the need for a small-c catholic church were exposed and weighed against the full spectrum of rival possibilities. McLuhan’s faith was that the result of this open assessment would be definitively favorable to the religious life:

No longer is it possible for modern man, individually or collectively, to live in any exclusive segment of human experience or achieved social pattern. The modern mind, whether in its subconscious collective dream or in its intellectual citadel of vivid awareness, is a stage on which is contained and re-enacted the entire experience of the human race. There are no more remote and easy perspectives, either artistic or national. Everything is present in the foreground. That fact is stressed equally in current physics, jazz, newspapers, and psychoanalysis. And it is not a question of preference or taste. This flood has already immersed us. (The Mechanical Bride, 87)

What we have to defend today is not the values developed in any particular culture or by any one mode of communication. Modern technology presumes to attempt a total transformation of man and his environment. This calls in turn for an inspection and defense of all human values. And so far as merely human aid goes, the citadel of this defense must be located in analytical awareness of the nature of the creative process involved in human cognition. For it is in this citadel that science and technology have already established themselves in their manipulation of (gen subj!) the new media. (Sight, Sound and the Fury, 1954)

The distinction at stake may be seen in McLuhan’s use of “citadel” in these passages (itself deriving from Joyce)1. Joyce differentiated “the citadel of his soul” from its “sanctuary”, their difference consisting in “his freedom”:

he wondered at (…) the remoteness of his own soul from what he had hitherto imagined her sanctuary, at the frail hold which so many years of order and obedience had of him when once a definite and irrevocable act of his threatened to end for ever, in time and in eternity, his freedom.

McLuhan, on the other hand, in a move going back to John Watson, saw “the citadel of his soul” and its “sanctuary” as harmonious (not to say identical) given “analytical2 awareness of the nature of the creative process involved in human cognition”.

Whereas Joyce “crossed (…) over the stream” in the name of freedom, McLuhan opted in the same name for “wholehearted participation in the great stream of human experience and endeavor” — a stream which included religion and its concrete tradition in the past of McLuhan’s particular civilization. 

  1. See “The very citadel of civilized awareness”.
  2.  McLuhan used “ana-lytical” both in its etymological and Kantian sense as ‘differentiated’ and as opposed to ‘syn-thetic’ (as a different kind of differentiation). In Bellum-Pax-Bellum McLuhan is cited treating this distinction as that of ‘fission’ vs ‘fusion’.

The very citadel of civilized awareness

The very frequency and violence of temptations showed him at last the truth of what he had heard about the trials of the saints. Frequent and violent temptations were a proof that the citadel of the soul had not fallen… (Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

McLuhan was evidently struck by Joyce’s formulation here of “the citadel of the soul” since he repeatedly used variations of the phrase in the 1950s:

The Mechanical Bride, vi:
criticism is free to point to the various means employed [in art works] to get the[ir] effect, as well as to decide whether the effect was worth attempting. As such, with regard to the modern state1, it can be a citadel of inclusive awareness amid the dim dreams of collective consciousness.

The Mechanical Bride, 87:
No longer is it possible for modern man, individually or collectively, to live in any exclusive segment of human experience or achieved social pattern. The modern mind, whether in its subconscious collective dream or in its intellectual citadel of vivid awareness, is a stage on which is contained and re-enacted the entire experience of the human race. There are no more remote and easy perspectives, either artistic or national. Everything is present in the foreground. That fact is stressed equally in current physics, jazz, newspapers, and psychoanalysis. And it is not a question of preference or taste. This flood has already immersed us.

Sight, Sound and the Fury, 1954
What we have to defend today is not the values developed in any particular culture or by any one mode of communication. Modern technology presumes to attempt a total transformation of man and his environment. This calls in turn for an inspection and defense of all human values. And so far as merely human aid goes, the citadel of this defense must be located in analytical awareness of the nature of the creative process involved in human cognition. For it is in this citadel that science and technology have already established themselves in their manipulation of the new media.

Educational Effects of Mass Media of Communication, 1956:
And no matter how many walls have fallen, the citadel of individual consciousness has not fallen nor is it likely to fall. For it is not accessible to the mass media.2

Printing and Social Change, 1959:
The literate man is one who is accustomed to the inner translation of sight into sound and of sound into sight, a complex activity for which he pays by psychic withdrawal, a weakening of sensuous life and a considerable lessening of the power of recall. But in return he obtains analytic mastery of specific areas of knowledge, and especially the power of applied science for social purposes. The increase of inner self-awareness resulting from the incessant translation of sound into sight and sight into sound also enhances his sense of individual identity and fosters that inner dialogue or conscience within, which we rightly associate with the very citadel of civilized awareness.

Characteristic for McLuhan was the attempt to bring together a way of describing art (derived especially from Pound) in terms of “individual consciousness” as the “citadel of inclusive awareness”, “vivid awareness” and “civilized awareness” — with science: “For it is in this citadel that science and technology have already established themselves in their manipulation of the new media.” Both art and science, separately, had come to develop an “analytical3 awareness of the nature of the creative process involved in human cognition”. Now was the time in which the two needed to be brought together explicitly in order to harness “the power of applied science for social purposes”.

Just this was already the message of McLuhan’s programmatic letter to Innis early in 1951:

One major discovery of the symbolists which had the greatest importance for subsequent investigation was their notion of the learning process as a labyrinth of the senses and faculties whose retracing provided the key to all arts and sciences (…) Retracing becomes in modern historical scholarship the technique of reconstruction. The technique which Edgar Poe first put to work in his detective stories. In the arts this discovery has had all those astonishing results which have seemed to separate the ordinary public from what it regards as esoteric magic. From the point of view of the artist however the business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. [Similarly] the whole tendency of modern communication whether in the press, in advertising, or in the high arts is toward participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts. And this major revolution, intimately linked to technology, is one whose consequences have not begun to be studied although they have begun to be felt. (…) As mechanical media have popularized and enforced the presence of the arts on all people it becomes more and more necessary to make studies of the function and effect of communication on society. (…) [However] the fallacy in the Deutsch-Wiener [cybernetics] approach is its failure to understand the techniques and functions of the traditional arts as the essential type of all human communication. (…)  There is a real, living unity [of art and science] in our time, as in any other, but it lies submerged under a superficial hubbub of sensation.

  1. This phrase (“the modern state”) may be an indication that McLuhan was reading Innis’ 1946 Political Economy in the Modern State as he was composing The Mechanical Bride in the late 1940s.
  2. These same two sentences were reused by McLuhan in the 1969 Counterblast, 135).
  3. McLuhan uses “ana-lytical” here in its etymological and Kantian sense as ‘differentiated’ and as opposed to ‘syn-thetic’. In Bellum-Pax-Bellum McLuhan is cited treating this distinction as that of ‘fission’ vs ‘fusion’.

John Watson’s heritage in political economics and communications

During an invited lecture given at the University of Toronto in 1938, [W.A.] Mackintosh paid homage to his fellow economist, Harold Innis: “If we ever come to the time when Who’s Who includes the intellectual pedigrees of scholars, there will appear an item: ‘Innis, H.A., by [Thorstein] Veblen, out of [Adam] Shortt‘.” In this spirit, a second entry would surely read: ‘Mackintosh, W.A., by [O.D.] Skelton, out of Shortt’. The teaching of political economy in Canada began in 1878, when John Watson lectured on the topic as part of the moral philosophy curriculum at Queen’s. (…) Nonetheless, it was not until [Watson’s pupil and colleague] Adam Shortt was appointed as lecturer at Queen’s in 1887 that the subject received systematic treatment. (Hugh Grant, W.A. Mackintosh: The Life of a Canadian Economist, 2015, p 6)

Innis (b 1894) at UT, and Mackintosh (b 1895) at Queen’s, 160 miles east of Toronto, were close contemporaries and were responsible for the introduction of the ‘staples thesis’ into Canadian economics and political theory. Mackintosh broached the topic explicitly in his 1923 article ‘Economic Factors in Canadian History’.1

As described by Hugh Grant in the head citation above, both were influenced in their broad view of political economics by Adam Shortt.  And Shortt, in turn, was a student and later colleague of Watson at Queen’s.

While attention (often of dubious quality however) has been paid to Watson’s lasting influence on philosophy in Canada, especially on George Grant and Charles Taylor, little to no attention has been paid to Watson’s influence on Innis, through Shortt, and on McLuhan, through Innis. Moreover, McLuhan’s most influential teachers when he was an undergraduate and M.A graduate student at the University of Manitoba, Henry Wright and Rupert Lodge, were two of the contributors (out of 11) to the Festschrift volume Watson received on the occasion of his 50th anniversary (1872-1922) teaching at Queen’s: Philosophical Essays Presented to John Watson.  Further still, another of the contributors was Fr Henry Carr whose indirect influence on McLuhan (especially by bringing Bernard Phelan and Etienne Gilson to St Michael’s) was massive.2

In short, Watson’s influence on Canadian life and thought, through his students and through further generations of students beyond them, was far greater than is generally known. Many of these like Shortt and Skelton eventually left the academy for work in the public service in Ottawa. And others, while still in the academy, like Carr or McLuhan, were active in areas and subjects far afield from Watson’s.  But what all received from Watson, directly or (mostly) indirectly, was the notion — now largely lost — that human reason, while ineluctably finite, can and does know truth in any domain to which it freely applies itself.

 

 

  1. Canadian Historical Review, March 1923, 12-25.
  2. A fourth contributor was G.S. Brett writing on ‘Some Reflections on Aristotle’s Theory of Tragedy’. Brett is cited in The Gutenberg Galaxy.

Henry Carr

In 2012 Father Henry Carr was designated as a person of national historic significance by the government of Canada. A press release (no longer available at the government of Canada website) gave the following backgrounder:

FATHER HENRY CARR (1880-1963)

A pioneering figure in the history of Catholic higher education in Canada, Father Carr played a key role in the evolution of St. Michael’s College in Toronto, from its origins as a small Catholic college focused on preparation for the priesthood, to a full arts college federated in 1910 with the University of Toronto. While at St. Michael’s, he promoted excellence in Catholic higher education, bringing well known Catholic scholars to the college and founding the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (1929), a world-renowned research institute located on the grounds of St. Michael’s College. Father Carr went on to be an advocate for the creation of Catholic colleges within secular universities, bringing the St. Michael’s model of federation to other universities and heading Catholic colleges at the Universities of Saskatchewan and British Columbia.

Henry Carr was born in Oshawa, Ontario, in 1880, the eldest of nine children in an Irish-immigrant family. He was educated first in the local separate school run by the Sisters of St. Joseph, and then at the Oshawa Collegiate Institute, graduating in 1897 with the gold medal for the top student. In the summer of 1897, while working in a Toronto lithographing shop, Carr learned of a teaching opportunity at St. Michael’s College, a Roman Catholic college in downtown Toronto run by the Basilian Fathers: in return for teaching beginner German at the high school level, Carr would be offered room and board at St. Michael’s, as well as enrollment in the college’s post-secondary classical course. Following a successful first year of teaching, Carr was given responsibility for teaching the “Varsity Class”, a small group of boys preparing for the university entrance examination. In 1899, while continuing his teaching duties, he enrolled in an honours course in Classics at the University of Toronto.

Carr entered St. Basil’s Novitiate in 1900. He was permitted to continue his university studies, and received his Honours B. A. in Classics in 1903. From 1903 until December 1904 he attended Assumption College in Windsor before returning to St. Michael’s College in 1905, when he was ordained. Father Carr played a critical role in the college’s federation with the University of Toronto in 1910 and was a central figure in its subsequent evolution, acting as superior and president from 1915 to 1925. Federation broke the long period of isolation from the mainstream of Canadian university life, and made St. Michael’s College one of the earliest English-Canadian Roman Catholic colleges to provide higher education in partnership with a secular institution. Father Carr attracted outstanding scholars to St. Michael’s and was instrumental in the establishment in 1929 of the Institute of Mediaeval Studies as a centre for scholarly research and publication. The Institute became an international centre of Thomistic studies, that is, the study of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. It attracted graduate students and scholars from around the world, including the prominent Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain. Father Carr served as superior general of the Basilian Congregation from 1930 to 1942. Later, he was the superior and principal at St. Thomas More College (1942-49) in Saskatchewan and at St. Mark’s College at the University of British Columbia (1956-61). At each of these institutions, he was directly involved in their federation with the university, viewing federation as the best solution for Catholic colleges in an age of increasing secularization, and never advocated for the stand-alone Catholic university, which was the dominant model in the United States. Father Carr retired in 1961 and died in 1963.

The government backgrounder does not mention Carr’s tremendous influence on athletics at St Michael’s and, indeed, nationally.  St. Michael’s College: 100 Years of Pucks and Prayers describes how:

In 1906, Father Henry Carr initiated a hockey program at [St Mike’s]. (…) It did not take long for the school to attain championship success, claiming the Allan Cup senior hockey title in 1910. Under the guidance of Father Carr and later Father David Bauer, the institution evolved into the top breeding ground for junior hockey players in preparation for the National Hockey League. On four occasions between 1934 and 1961, St. Michael’s captured four Memorial Cup titles as the nation’s best team in junior hockey.

Carr was equally successful in football:

after its inaugural season in 1897, Fr. Henry Carr, C.S.B. led the [football] team in 1909 to a Canadian [Junior Football League, CJFL] Championship. Coach Carr (…) introduced both hockey and football to St. Michael’s as a way to integrate the Irish Catholic College and community into the fabric of the city. Luckily, Carr found two willing partners for his unique brand of ecumenism in the principals of Upper Canada College and St. Andrew’s College. Thus two new rivalries on the ice and field were born. Carr strongly believed that athletics were an excellent way to instill discipline and knowledge into young men, and he hoped to create a reputation for athletic excellence that would establish St. Michael’s name across the country. Carr’s exploits as a coach were legendary and beyond leading teams to  championships, he was a true football innovator, with many crediting Carr and other Basilian coaches for introducing the forward pass into the Canadian game in the 1920’s. (St Mike Blue Banner, 2009, p 22-23)

In philosophy, however, Carr was of international, not only national, importance.  He was able to attract Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson to St Michael’s Mediaeval Institute at a time when Maritain was arguably the most influential Catholic intellectual in the world and when Gilson had been offered a chair at Harvard.

At the heart of Carr’s vision was the determination that neither Catholics nor Canadians needed to fear competition from any quarter. Instead, their calling was to immerse themselves in the widest possible world of their contemporaries — but without giving up their identity as Catholics or Canadians or, indeed, as Catholic Canadians.  This was exactly the position described by McLuhan as one Catholic Canadian in the year before he came to St Michael’s:

My increasing awareness has been of the ease with which Catholics can penetrate and dominate secular concerns — thanks to an emotional and spiritual economy denied to the confused secular mind. But this cannot be done by any Catholic group, nor by Catholic individuals, trained in the vocabularies and attitudes which make our [usual] education the feeble simulacrum of the world which it is. It seems obvious that we must confront the secular in its most confident manifestations, and, with its own terms and postulates, to shock it into awareness of its confusion, its illiteracy, and the terrifying drift of its logic. There is no need to mention Christianity. It is enough that it be known that the operator is a Christian. This job must be conducted on every front — every phase of the press, book-rackets, music, cinema, education, economics. Of course, points of reference must always be made. That is, the examples of real art and prudence must be seized, when available, as paradigms of future effort. (…) These can serve to educate a huge public, both Catholic and non-Catholic, to resist that swift obliteration of the person which is going on [today]. (McLuhan to Clement McNaspy, SJ, Christmas 1945, Letters 180)

 

Bellum-Pax-Bellum

The only extended word for word citation in Finnegans Wake is the following:

Aujourd’hui, comme aux temps de Pline et de Columelle, la jacinthe se plaît dans les Gaules, la pervenche en Illyrie, la marguerite sur les ruines de Numance; et, pendant qu’autour d’elles les villes ont changé de maîtres et de nom, que plusieurs sont entrées dans le néant, que les civilisations se sont choquées et brisées, leurs paisibles générations ont traversé les âges et se sont succédé jusqu’à nous, fraîches et riantes comme au jour des batailles. (FW 281)

Today, as in the days of Pliny and Columella, the hyacinth disports in Gaul, the periwinkle in Illyria, the daisy on the ruins of Numantia; and while around them the cities have changed masters and names, while some have ceased to exist, while the civilisations have collided with one another and shattered, their peaceful generations have passed through the ages, and have come up to us, one following the other, fresh and cheerful as on the days of the battles.

Joyce was quoting the French historian Edgar Quinet (1803-75), from Introduction à La Philosophie de l’Histoire de l’Humanité (1857), via the naturalist, Léon Metchnikoff (1838-1888),  who cited Quinet in his La Civilisation et les Grands Fleuves Historiques (1889). Joyce read Metchnikoff’s book in 1924. As nicely set out in the From Swerve of Shore to Bend of Bay blog from which the above translation is taken, Joyce used the Quinet text over and over again in FW and was known to cite it by heart in his conversation. Peter Chrisp, the Swerve of Shore blogger, describes how:

Joyce summed up the [Edgar Quinet] sentence in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver: ‘E.Q. says that the wild flowers on the ruins of Carthage, Numancia etc have survived the political rises and falls of Empires’ (L1: 295).  Quinet uses classical Rome as the example of empire. Pliny the Elder and Columella were the great Roman writers on nature: Pliny wrote a massive Natural History and Columella wrote books on Agriculture and Trees. Numantia was a city in Spain whose inhabitants committed suicide rather than surrender to the Romans. Illyria in the western Balkans and Gaul (France) were also conquered by Rome.
Joyce said he ‘felt at home’ in this sentence. He shared Quinet’s detached view of history, eternally repeating the same events. (…). In later life, says [Richard] Ellmann [in his biography of Joyce], [Samuel] Beckett ‘thought this ability to contemplate with telescopic eye Joyce’s most impressive characteristic, and quoted four lines from Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’ to illustrate:
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,
Atoms of systems into ruin hurled,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world.’  (Ellmann, James Joyce, 1982, 709)

The same Quinet citation is treated in How Joyce Wrote Finnegans WakeA Chapter-by-chapter Genetic Guide, ed Luca Crispi and Sam Slote (2007), where it is seen as central to the involuted structure of the entire book:

the turning point for [the FW character] Shaun [the post], and indeed for Finnegans Wake [as a whole], came when Joyce read a book by Leon Metchnikoff, La Civilisation et les Grands Fleuves Historiques. Metchnikoff describes Giambattista Vico’s cyclical theories of corsi and ricorsi as the underlying dynamic for historical progress. Joyce had already been interested in Vico, but this book seemed to have energized his thoughts on the matter and especially on how he could deal with Shaun. The delivery of the letter is no longer a single episode in the saga of HCE but rather a repetition and recapitulation, “by a commodious vicus of recirculation” (FW: 003.02), of that saga into a different register. Shaun’s delivery of the letter replays HCE’s downfall, which is what is recorded, somehow, in the letter itself. The discovery of Shaun’s role could thus be seen as the final nail in the coffin of Wakean narrative as “goahead plot” (LIII: 146).  With Book III Wakean narrative turns back on itself to repeat “the seim anew” (FW: 215.23). If Book I could be said to move forward in the explication of HCE’s fate, then Book III moves backward. As Joyce explained to Weaver, the first part of Book III “is a description of a postman travelling backwards in the night through events already narrated. It is written in the form of a via crucis of 14 stations but is actually only a barrel rolling down the river Liffey” (LI: 214). What Joyce had been experimenting with at the local level with the textual reverberations emanating from the [post-Ulysses] sketches (…) has now, with the invention of Shaun, become the organizing structural principle for the work as a whole.
Another element Joyce derived from Metchnikoff’s book is a quotation from the French philosopher of history Edgar Quinet’s book Introduction à La Philosophie de l’Histoire de l’Humanité  (…). It is clear that Joyce derived the quote from Metchnikoff, since he reproduces Metchnikoff’s errors. The sentence describes the effects of temporal change, and Joyce described it as “beautiful” (LI: 295). The sentence was ultimately to take on a kind of nodal resonance as it wound up being incorporated into the [FW] text six times with varying degrees of Wakean distortion. (‘Introduction’, 19-20)

“Temporal change” at the end of this passage is a surprising singular, since the central point of the Quinet sentence would seem to be the contrasting times in the lives of cities and whole civilisations compared to that of flowers. The chapter of FW, in which the Quinet citation appears in its word for word form, features marginal notes from Joyce.  Next to the citation appears:

THE PART PLAYED BY BELLETRISTICKS IN THE BELLUM-PAX-BELLUM.
MUTUOMORPHOMUTATION. (FW 281)

The time of the mutuomorphomutation of cities, empires and civilizations — and, indeed, of “belletristicks” like Shem’s and Joyce’s own efforts — is not the time of flowers nor that of mutuomorphomutation itself. The latter times, although not without their own dynamic rhythms, are synchronic (always in play, always about to bloom again and again, regenerating themselves in and through death), while the former are diachronic and definitively subject to death.  Identity in the former infolds ‘passing away’; in the latter ‘passing away’ is — ‘passing away’.

These contrasting times are particularly focused in Joyce’s note: BELLUM-PAX-BELLUM. On the one hand, this could be taken in the “register” of “goahead plot” or diachronic law: this is time’s arrow to which cities, empires and civilizations, along with belletristicks, are subject. On the other, BELLUM-PAX-BELLUM could be read as the synchronic spectrum of being itself, a triple form which human beings have always already witnessed (although nearly always in “blackout” mode) traversing their perpetual ano-kato pathway in the genesis of experience.

Now McLuhan imagined this synchronic process in terms of Poe’s Maelstrom.  On this model, human beings are at every moment subject to a katabasis into a “worldpool” of warring forms — BELLUM-PAX-BELLUM — from which they emerge, or have always already emerged, into their momentary experience, like Poe’s mariner riding a “barrel” to the surface of the sea out of the Maelstrom whirlpool.

Consideration of this process led to McLuhan’s stipulation in Take Today:

There are only two basic extreme forms of human organization. They have innumerable variants or “parti-colored” forms. The extreme forms are the civilized and the tribal (eye and ear): the Cromwellian specialist and the Celtic involved. Only the civilized form is fragmented in action…(22; the bracketed insertion of “eye and ear” is from McLuhan)

Compare Joyce in conversation with Georges Borach fifty years before in 1918:

There are indeed hardly more than a dozen original themes in world literature. Then there is an enormous number of combinations of these themes.1

The advance from “two basic extreme forms” (eye/ear) to three, BELLUM-PAX-BELLUM (aka eye-ear-eye), occurs through the fact that BELLUM, as the word itself indicates, and as its doubling (Dublin) in BELLUM-PAX-BELLUM makes explicit, is “fragmented in action”. Its warring sides each claim fundamental priority and exactly therefore eternally battle against the other in an endless attempt to establish a singular priority for themselves alone. Considered synchronistically, where “all is always now”, such a war of archetypal forms can have no end. Both of its sides must be equally original and, therefore, unknown to themselves, behind their backs so to say, subject to a kind of PAX as their mutual right to be a part (or “station”) of the archetypal order. To wage their endless war, they must be double, but with a common standing.

The further advance from 2 and 3 to “hardly more than a dozen” is generated through the fact that BELLAM, as a contesting power that is “fragmented in action”, is subject to degree. The opposition between the belligerent sides ranges along the archetypal spectrum from the avowed obliteration of the other at the extremes of their mutual antagonism to the PAX of mutual recognition where the two meet in the middle of the range. 

In short, the archetypal powers are arrayed in along a spectrum whose double ends (Dublin) tend toward the maximum antagonism of the warring sides (BELLUM-BELLUM) and whose middle represents their PAX. The Gutenberg Galaxy would tell the tale of the diachronic ascendancy of BELLUM over PAX over the last 500 years and begin the exposition in its concluding section of ‘The Galaxy Reconfigured’ in the ‘electric age’ today.2

Considering the perpetual exposure to the forms of being in the genesis of human experience, McLuhan wrote to Innis early in 1951:

One major discovery of the symbolists which had the greatest importance for subsequent investigation was their notion of the learning process as a labyrinth of the senses and faculties whose retracing provided the key to all arts and sciences… (Letters 221)

“The learning process” requires a resetting of experience. What the symbolists dis-covered according to McLuhan (citing especially Whitehead in this connection, but the general notion was vaguely in the air in the mid 20th century, hence the sudden appearance of cybernetics at that time) was that human experience is constituted, or perpetually reconstituted, through nothing else than such “learning”. Unlike physical materials whose being can be reset only through extremes of temperature and pressure, the notion here was that the being of human experience is continually reset via a momentary or synchronic katabasis into “a labyrinth of the senses and faculties”. This was to characterize the archetypal forms in terms of what was affected and, indeed, effected, by exposure to them: the variable shapes of “the senses and faculties”. There was no fixed orientation of the senses or faculties (the attachment to which defined the Gutenberg Galaxy); there was only a kaleidoscope of different configurations of these which became set through the synchronic process of ‘descent into the Maelstrom‘.

Exactly therefore, the “innumerable variants or ‘parti-colored’ forms” and “enormous number of combinations” of human experience. The ‘molecules’ and ‘compounds’ and ‘mixtures’ of experience resulted not only from diachronic interactions, like physical materials, but also, and above (or below) all, from moment to moment exposure to the entire range of experiential possibilities or forms and the resulting changes from this exposure. Human beings are exactly that type of being that is uniquely exposed to both these times at once.

As illustrated already by the 1918 observation of Joyce, itself doubtless related to Jung’s work at the time, and that to Freud and Frazer, modernity was the time when a resetting of experience was “learning” to focus on this resetting process of learning itself.  And it was doing so through a “retracing” of what had always already been retraced. 

Starting in the late 1940s, McLuhan began using Poe’s “Descent into the Maelstrom” as a figure of this synchronic process. At around the same time, he seems3 to have encountered Havelock’s two essays ‘Virgil’s Road to Xanadu’ (1946-1947) and ‘The Journey of Aeneas through the Waste Land’ (1949), in which a synchronic katabasis under the sea or into the underground is detailed in the literary environment of Virgil. At this time, too, he met Ezra Pound with Hugh Kenner and began an intense correspondence with Pound that lasted a full decade.  And, also with Kenner, he reread Eliot, again, especially Four Quartets, Pound, especially the Cantos, and Lewis (again) and Joyce (ditto). 

On other fronts, he continued his immersion in French symbolism (as Sigfried Gideon had recommended in 1944) resulting in his considerable unpublished manuscript ‘Prelude to Prufrock’. And, here prompted and assisted by his old Winnipeg buddy, Tom Easterbrook, he began as well his Auseinandersetzung with the work of Harold Innis and especially with his 1942 observation:

The concepts of time and space must be made relative and elastic and the attention given by the social scientists to problems of space should be paralleled by attention to problems of time. (‘The Newspaper in Economic Development’, reprinted in Political Economy in the Modern State, 1946)

The upshot of this vast and as yet inchoate complex of interests and influences was his developing notion of experience as a constant retracing of its principles or forms through a katabasis into their “worldpool”. Experience was always the result or effect of some selection out of that “worldpool” that McLuhan imagined in terms of the decision of Poe’s mariner in the Maelstrom to abandon his ship and to entrust himself, instead, to a “barrel”.

Now, rereading Joyce around 1950, this was exactly what he found in FW:

With Book III Wakean narrative turns back on itself to repeat “the seim anew” (FW: 215.23). If Book I could be said to move forward in the explication of HCE’s fate, then Book III moves backward. As Joyce explained to Weaver, the first part of Book III “is a description of a postman travelling backwards in the night through events already narrated. It is written in the form of a via crucis of 14 stations but is actually only a barrel rolling down the river Liffey”

FW research has paid some attention to Poe, both on account of his short story, ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844), and on account of his influence on the symbolists via Baudelaire. But it may not have considered if Joyce’s “barrel rolling down the river Liffey” is Poe’s barrel in the Maelstrom. In any case, regardless of whether Joyce himself intended this connection, the vertical motion of Poe’s barrel reveals how Joyce’s horizontal “barrel rolling down the river” must be understood. Because time is “travelling backwards” here into the night of consciousness, and because it thereby revisits all “events already narrated” in their possibility (hence the need to abandon the language of actuality), such a barrel cannot be taken to disport itself in any fixed sense of “down”.  Instead, the coordinates of human action and experiences are here exposed as being just as relative as those of physical materials whose orientation depends entirely on the momentary perspective taken on them. (Hence the importance to relativity theory of Einstein’s thought experiments where, eg, clocks travel at the speed of light.)

What McLuhan discovered in Joyce4 at this time around 1950 was what he already knew from Mallarmé and Eliot and Pound.

Mallarmé discovered that the aesthetic moment of arrested cognition can be split up into numerous fractions which can be orchestrated in many discontinuous ways. (…) Joyce, Pound, and Eliot recovered the secret of the dolce stil nuovo [of Dante] through the prismatically arranged landscapes of Rimbaud and Mallarmé. And this secret consists in nothing less than a fusion of the learning and the creative processes [aka, of the genesis of experience] in the analysis and reconstruction of the aesthetic moment of arrested awareness. This peculiar fusion of the cognitive and the creative by an act of retracing the stages of apprehension was arrived at by Joyce as a result of the prior discovery for the technique of fission of the moment of aesthetic awareness. (…) In art as in physics fission preceded fusion. (The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry, 1951)

“The technique of fission” here was study of that synchronic “via crucis of 14 stations” through which experience is generated — ie, just what cybernetics was investigating at MIT (initially for the military) and what corporations were investigating for management training and marketing and what advertising agencies were investigating in their consumer research.

From his first years as a university student around 1930, McLuhan had been interested both in theory (aesthetics, epistemology and ontology) and in the practical world around him of education, entertainment, business and politics. Now, 20 years later around 1950, he found a way to bring these concerns together in the investigation of “the stages of cognition”:

Mallarmé wrote his most difficult poem, Un Coup de Dés, in newspaper format. He saw, like Joyce, that the basic forms of communication — whether speech, writing, print, press, telegraph, or photography — necessarily were fashioned in close accord with man’s cognitive activity. And the more extensive the mass medium the closer it must approximate to our cognitive faculties. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954)

What we have to defend today is not the values developed in any particular culture or by any one mode of communication. Modern technology presumes to attempt a total transformation of man and his environment. This calls in turn for an inspection and defense of all human values. And so far as merely human aid goes, the citadel of this defense must be located in analytical awareness of the nature of the creative process involved in human cognition. For it is in this citadel that science and technology have already established themselves in their manipulation of the new media. (Sight, Sound and the Fury, 1954)

  1. Borach, ‘Conversations with James Joyce’, College English, March 1954, 325-327.
  2. McLuhan’s faith might be said to be the perception that even BELLUM implicates PAX.  This is ‘the main question‘.
  3. “Seems”, because the evidence so far is only indirect.
  4.  McLuhan’s re-engagement with Joyce in the early 1950s was marked by three substantial essays: ‘Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process’ (1951); ‘James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial’ (1953); ‘Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press’ (1954).

The bubble of life in Joyce’s Portrait

His very brain was sick and powerless (…) He seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard in it an echo of the infuriated cries within him. He could respond to no earthly or human appeal, dumb and insensible to the call of summer and gladness and companionship (…) retaining nothing of all he read save that which seemed to him an echo or a prophecy of his own state… (Chapter 2)

He could scarcely interpret the letters of the signboards of the shops. (…) listlessness seemed to be diffusing in the air around him a tenuous and deadly exhalation and he found himself glancing from one casual word to another on his right or left in stolid wonder that they had been so silently emptied of instantaneous sense until every mean shop legend bound his mind like the words of a spell and his soul shrivelled up sighing with age as he walked on in a lane among heaps of dead language. His own consciousness of language was ebbing from his brain… ( (Chapter 2, Chapter 5)

A sense of fear of the unknown moved in the heart of his weariness, a fear of symbols and portents, of the hawk-like man [Daedalus] whose name he bore soaring out of his captivity on osier-woven wings, of Thoth, the god of writers, writing with a reed upon a tablet and bearing on his narrow ibis head the cusped moon.  (Chapter 5)

the cry of his heart was broken. His lips began to murmur (…) then went on stumbling through half verses, stammering and baffled; then stopped. The heart’s cry was broken.  (Chapter 5)

Voices in Dubliners and A Portrait

Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

While his mind had been pursuing its intangible phantoms (…) he had heard about him the constant voices of his father and of his masters, urging him to be a gentleman above all things and urging him to be a good catholic above all things. These voices had now come to be hollow-sounding in his ears. When the gymnasium had been opened he had heard another voice urging him to be strong and manly and healthy and when the movement towards national revival had begun to be felt in the college yet another voice had bidden him be true to his country and help to raise up her language and tradition. In the profane world, as he foresaw, a worldly voice would bid him raise up his father’s fallen state by his labours and, meanwhile, the voice of his school comrades urged him to be a decent fellow, to shield others from blame or to beg them off and to do his best to get free days for the school. And it was the din of all these hollow-sounding voices that made him halt irresolutely in the pursuit of phantoms.

As described in The Put-on, McLuhan’s life from the time of his boyhood onward was filled with contending voices. This ultimately raised the questions for him of the validity of any one of these voices and of what to make of their multiplicity.

In the Portrait passage above, Joyce described some of the voices Stephen Dedalus heard about him as he grew. Meanwhile, he described their collective murmur in the Dubliners:

The grey warm evening of August had descended upon the city and a mild warm air, a memory of summer, circulated in the streets. The streets, shuttered for the repose of Sunday, swarmed with a gaily coloured crowd. Like illumined pearls the lamps shone from the summits of their tall poles upon the living texture below which, changing shape and hue unceasingly, sent up into the warm grey evening air an unchanging unceasing murmur. (Two Gallants)

His investigation of voices would be continued in Ulysses, while the murmur of language itself, embracing all these voices, indeed all possible voices, would be treated in Finnegans Wake.

Occultation of human thought

McLuhan wrote to Ezra Pound on December 21, 1948 about American ignorance of “the ideogram principle” aka of “the inclusive image“:

The American mind is not even close to being amenable to the ideogram principle as yet. The reason is simply this. America is 100% 18th Century. The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy — the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the U.S.A. I am trying to devise a way of stating this difficulty as it exists. Until stated and publicly recognized for what it is, poetry and the arts can’t exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind. (Letters 207)

Re the ” deep occultation of nearly all human thought”, see Dagwood and the ineradicable roots of our being (1944):

As excessive activity starved the other needs of man and sharpened the spirit of gain and commercialism, an unofficial blackout was ordained over the spiritual and intellectual areas of man’s nature.

Given this “occultation” or “blackout”, art, religion and philosophy — “the spiritual and intellectual areas of man’s nature” — were now surface phenomena serving only for manipulation:

The press, the pulps, the slicks, and Hollywood — it is a great nursery world of sensations, thrills, and wide-eyed child-like myopia. (Dagwood)

The result was that Americans aka the modern world

can never discover nourishment for these roots in popular art and literature.

The Gorgon

It presents a hair-raising difficulty. Or rather a hair-removing difficulty – it makes my hair fall out, to think about it! (‘Love’, Saturday Night Magazine, 25-28, February, 1967)

I’m quite helpless. Its a real humming, buzzing confusion. (Interview on CBC ‘Our World’ , June 24, 1967)

For McLuhan, mythology was not something from the old days or some kind of vague rival to religion and philosophy. In a world of “allatonceness”, it was here now, in all its power.

Nihilism has flooded the planet and, just as Nietzsche described it would, it has eviscerated our community and with it our morality, our traditions and our fellow feeling for the creatures of the earth (including any sort of different creatures of our own kind). McLuhan saw that, without our notice, we had been turned to stone by the Gorgon — the hydra-headed monster whose mere glance paralyses. It followed that we could not cure ourselves and heal our world without somehow confronting, like Perseus, “the Gorgon of the present”.  But this was a Gorgon inside us who had taken over our very selves! A Gorgon in our “in learning and knowing”!

Myth and Mass Media (1959):
Languages as human artifacts, collective products of human skill and need, can easily be regarded as “mass media,” but many find it difficult to consider the newer media deriving from these languages as new “languages.” Writing, in its several modes, can be regarded technologically as the development of new languages. For to translate the audible into the visible by phonetic means is to institute a dynamic process that reshapes every aspect of thought, language, and society. To record the extended operation of such a process in a Gorgon or Cadmus myth is to reduce a complex historical affair to an inclusive timeless image. Can we, perhaps, say that in the case of a single word, myth is present as a single snapshot of a complex process, and that in the case of a narrative myth with its peripety, a complex process is recorded in a single inclusive image? The multilayered montage or “transparency,” with its abridgement of logical relationships, is as familiar in the cave painting as in cubism. (…) Is the Gorgon myth an account of the effects of literacy in arresting the modes of knowledge? Certainly the Cadmus myth about letters as the dragon’s teeth that sprang up [as] armed men is an image of the dynamics of literacy in creating empires.  H. A. Innis in his Empire and Communications has given us a full exegesis of the Cadmus myth. But the Gorgon myth is in much greater need of exegesis, since it concerns the role of media in learning and knowing

McLuhan Interview on CBC ‘Our World’ (1967):
people have always, in all ages, been terrified of the present. The only people that seem to have enough gumption, or nerve, to look at what is happening right under their nose are artists. They are specialists in sensory life. They just deliberately look at the present, you know, as if they dared it to ruin, or do something to them. They are like Perseus and the Gorgon. The artist looks into the mirror of art and says, the heck with the gorgon’s image, I’m not terrified. But most people simply expect, when they look at the present, to be turned to stone, as by the gorgon’s spell, and they are terrified. Therefore they prefer the rear-view mirror.

The Invisible Environment: The Future of an Erosion (1967):
You can never perceive the impact of any new technology directly; but it can be done in the manner of Perseus looking at the Gorgon in the mirror of artYou have to perceive the consequences of the new environment on the old environment before you know what the new environment is. You cannot tell what it is until you have seen it do things to the old one.

Understanding Canada and Sundry Other Matters  (1967):
But one thing I have been working on lately and I haven’t solved: the go-go girl and the discotheque. They’ve been around in the environment, and I didn’t pay any heed at all until I suddenly said to myself, shucks, anything like that must have some relevance, some meaning for people; otherwise, they wouldn’t tolerate it. Because in itself it is just hideous and it’s a nice example of the Gorgon of the present; the horrible thing that nobody can look at without being turned to stone.1

Cliche to Archetype (1970):
Throughout the entire discussion of
Fiction and the Reading Public Mrs. [Q.D.] Leavis makes the assumption of a “higher code” which it is the function of literature to make accessible. Entree via this code is presumed sufficient to enable the reader to “place” the products and activities of any culture at all. Mrs. Leavis is making the familiar literary assumption that matching, rather than making, is the function of literary training. In a world of rapid innovation and environmental development the “finer code” permits the classi­fication of novelties and the rejection of vulgarity, but for the creation of new codes from new cultural materials, the finer code, as a mere matching or checking device, is quite ineffectual. Indeed, the “finer code” that Mrs. Leavis finds so adequately manifested in the homogeneous tonalities of eighteenth-century prose is an interesting example of the environmental form being moved up to nostalgic archetypal status by a nineteenth-century mind. It is the nineteenth century that discovers rich cultural values in the ritual gestures and corporate decorum of eighteenth-century discourse. The twentieth century, on the other hand, has discovered many new values in the popular art and literature of the nineteenth century. (…) What appears to elude the Leavis approach is the role of ­new art and literature in creating new perception for new environ­ments. Such environments are invisible and invincible except as they are raised to consciousness by new artistic styles and probes. With the advent of new styles or instruments of perception, the effect of the new environment is to mirror the image of the old one. The industrial nineteenth century developed a considerable empathy for anthropology and the study of nonliterate societies. [But] industrial and print technology have a profoundly fragmenting effect on human sensibilities. It was not, therefore, very realistic to use nonliterate societies as a “mirror of Perseus” in which to observe the hated face of the industrial Gorgon.  (174-175)

Take Today, ‘Polemics Right And Left Thrive By Hardening Of The Categories’ (1972):
What Marx called “the process of producing surplus value” is the nineteenth-century version of usury. Whereas Aristotle saw Nature as the
ground against which appeared the gargoyle of usury, Marx saw the market as the ground from which stared the Gorgon of surplus valueLet an entrepreneur buy materials and “labor power” on the market and combine them in a production process to create a buggy. Let him sell the buggy in a free market. The difference between his investment and his take is his profit or loss. Marx assumes a continuing operation backed by a whole social superstructure of services. He would define as “accident” a single transaction. “Surplus value” results from the private use of the entire superstructure of social services. The basic figure is the material “production process” looked at against the ground of the social “superstructure.” Access to this corporate superstructure is via the new fragmentation of the market process. The ancient political principle of “divide and rule” had now permeated the entire social fabric. All the human institutions that had been built to serve the common good could now be channeled into private pockets.

Take Today, ‘The Recognition Of Process As Prior To Classification Is The Key To Relevant Decision‘ (1972):
New instant speed of data processing reverses the order of organizing any structure or procedure. Whereas mere headings were once specialist, mechanical catchalls, they now become the avenues of insight into complex organic processes. An obvious example is pollution. It has always been a major feature of any environment. At high information speeds it presents a Gorgon-like and intolerable visage. It is no longer a category or nuisance, but a process that turns [whole] societies to stone.  (106)

McLuhan to Joe Keogh, April 11, 1973:
Apropos dialogue, it is done with mirrors, of course, only you hold the mirror up to the public. Was it not Perseus who thus beheaded Gorgon by looking at it in a mirror of art, as it were? By holding the mirror up to the public you literally confront the Gorgon of tangled impressions and biases. You ‘put them on’ this way, as well, and you can sort through their problems at will.

Laws of Media (1988):
The ground that envelops the user of any new technological word completely massages and reshapes both user and culture. In this way too these words (extensions) have all the transforming power of the primal logos. Westerners’ only escape or antidote has hitherto been by means of artistic enterprise. All serious art, to use Pound’s phrase, functions satirically as a mirror or counter-environment to exempt the user from tyranny by his self-imposed environment, just as Perseus’s shield enabled him to escape stupefaction by the Gorgon. The art historian has long puzzled over the question: at what point do primitive cultures develop arts? Evidently the Balinese had not yet confronted the problem when they answered, ‘We have no art; we do everything as well as possible’. Art is a response to a situation that has reached a certain intensity (…) or paralysis… (226)

 

  1. McLuhan continued in this interview to note that “the go-go girl, as the Gorgon of the present, has this wonderful built-in past environment, the cage.” At around this same time in a CBC program, McLuhan riffed on go-go girls once again: “They (the young) still think in the old patterns, 19th-century patterns, but they live mythically. They live surrounded by mythic monsters like go-go girls. (…) The go-go girls ordinarily have a cage (…) so the go-go girls, (each) locked up each in her little world, represents a kind of theatre of the absurd, in which all communication has broken down. In fact, no attempt is really made to communicate. Each puts on her own show in her own little straitjacket.” (‘The McLuhan is the Message’, Telescope, CBC Television, 20 July 1967. See ‘Marshall McLuhan on go-go dancers‘ and ‘Flip-side Overlap’: The Medium Is The Music‘.)

Monstrosity

Understanding Media (1964):
What the Orient saw in a Hollywood movie was a world in which all the ordinary people had cars and electric stoves and refrigerators. So the Oriental now regards himself as an ordinary person who has been deprived of the ordinary man’s birthright. That is another way of getting a view of the film medium as monster ad for consumer goods. In America this major aspect of film is merely subliminal. Far from regarding our pictures as incentives to mayhem and revolution, we take them as solace and compensation, or as a form of deferred payment by daydreaming. But the Oriental is right, and we are wrong about this. In fact, the movie is a mighty limb of the industrial giant. (294-295)

Address at Vision 65 (1965):
The 16th Century created the public as a new environment. This completely altered politics and altered all social arrangements in education, in work, and in every other area. Electric circuitry did not [continue to] create the public; it created the mass, meaning an environment of information that involved everybody in everybody. Now, to a man brought up in the environment of the public, the mass audience is a horror, it is a mess. In the same way, the public was many-headed monster to a feudal aristocrat.

The Hardware/Software Mergers (1969):
When figure and ground merge you have the monster.  

Further Thoughts on Icons (1970):
The TV camera is a Cyclops, a one-eyed monster, which merges the gestalt of figure and ground and turns the viewer into a kind of hunter.

Advice for Universities of the Future (1971):
In the big universities of today the community of the university itself has become as big as a city, as a big city. Universities of 20 to 30 thousand students no longer represent universities at all but represent cities. The modern university, big metropolitan universities, have merged figure and ground — university and community — in what is in effect a monstrous situation. When you merge the figure and ground you have a monster. King Kong is the image of modern man’s service environments stretching out to such size that they crush him. King Kong is our own man-made environment stepping on us.

McLuhan letter to Jim Davey Sept 29, 1971:
The really devastating programming [in the formation of modern society] is the destruction of perception and sensitivity by the creation of vast environments far exceeding human scale. The King Kong fantasies are direct expressions of the feeling most people have in their environments which have become monsters. Yet, the best intentioned bureaucrats in all governments are busily engaged in creating bigger and blacker King Kongs every day of the week. (Letters 441)

Take Today, ‘From Piles of Refuse to Monolithic Slums’  (1972):
When “order” is pushed to extremes (…) [it] becomes ordure. (…) The engulfing of the human scale in providing living accommodation by high-rise creates the hardware monolith where figure and ground grind each other to numerical bits. (…) This is the antisocial monster. The slum is the reverse, but more tolerable. Multiple families crowded in single dwellings turn the environmental ground into figure. This is the social monster. The social monster of the swarming slum has many values of diversity and great powers of endurance [aka ordurance]. Its antisocial opposite, the high-rise “slum”, has no [such] power of survival [via ordurance] (28-29)

Take Today, ‘Gigantism: the nemesis of classical elegance’  (1972):
Gigantism is compelled to grow until collapse. Adaptability is absent. Survival demands an “unthinkable” reversal of scale and pattern. At least, this megalithic monster of moreness tells us we are in the domain of Lord Kelvin, where everything can be said in numbers. It happens that Kelvin spent his life striving to reach absolute zero: the giant omission. Little did Kelvin realize how the numbers racket would be developed in economics and in the studies of the psychologists. His dream of absolute zero has been realized many times in the social sciences but remains a mirage for the physicist. (108)

Take Today, ‘Market-Anti-Market Merger’ (1972):
In Catch-22, the figure of the black market and the ground of war merge into a monster presided over by the syndicate. When war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood. What has happened to war and market in today’s new “software” age is that both involve total commitment in contrast to the specialist “hardware” world of the nineteenth century. The contrast can be observed in the figure-ground relations of the slave market compared with the labor market. Labor is one thing; man as a commodity is another. Today, modes of business and warfare alike tend to blur these distinctions. (211)

Take Today, ‘The Capsized Organization Chart’ (1972):
nature itself performs a figure/ground merger, an OUROBOROS monster, uniting earth and air. (The worm OUROBOROS, which ate its own tail, is the ancient mythic symbol of a world that survives by endlessly devouring itself.)  (254)

The Argument: Causality in the Electric World (1973):
This music [of Marx and Engels] is worse than it sounds”, for it is played literally by eye without ear. Although its epistemology is dialectical, its ontology still rests on abstract Greek Nature. Marx and Engels saw conflicts of old figures as creating [revolutionary] grounds (…) while they remained oblivious of the new information surround that had [already] transformed their assumptions. They were attempting to match [!] the concepts of an earlier age to the experience newly visible in the “rear-view-mirror” of the 19th century. They were
unaware that percepts of existence always lie behind concepts of Nature. Their hidden hang-up was the visual bias of all “objectivity” [and “subjectivity”], whether “materialist” or “idealist.” (…) While the “subjectivist” puts on the world as his own clothes, the “objectivist” supposes that he can stand naked “out of this world.”  The ideal [goal] of the rationalist philosophers still persists [on both sides]: to achieve an inclusive “science of the sciences.” But such a “science” would be a monster of preconceived figures minus un-perceived grounds.

Interview With Marshall McLuhan: His Outrageous Views About Women (1974):
Horror shows are just a record of what people think has already happened to themselves. Exorcism is a picture of what they feel they have been through.

On the Evils of TV (1977):
[TV is] literally a tribal monster like the Minotaur from Greek mythology trapped in a maze of sensation. This Bull-man monster swallowed humans lost in the maze. And that’s exactly what TV does (…) our young are fed to the Minotaur1

  1. For further McLuhan takes on the minotaur, see Minotaur.

From the unconscious to the conscious to consciousness of the unconscious

1960
In the present age of all-at-onceness, we have discovered that it is impossible — personally, collectively, technologically — to live with the subliminal. Paradoxically, at this moment in our culture, we meet once more preliterate man. For him there was no subliminal factor in experience; his mythic forms of explanation explicated all levels of any situation at the same time. (‘Introduction’ to Explorations in Communication)

1960
The all-­at-once, many-leveled awareness of the electronic age discourages continuation of the unexamined subliminal back-log of literate man. (The Medium is the Message)

1964
Finnegans Wake is a set of multi-leveled puns on the reversal by which Western man enters his tribal, or Finn, cycle once more, following the track of the old Finn, but wide awake this time as we re-enter the tribal night. It is like our contemporary consciousness of the Unconscious. (Understand Media, 35)

1964 
Any process that approaches instant interrelation of a total field tends to raise itself to the level of conscious awareness… (Understand Media, 351)

1969
With Gutenberg the first mechanization of a handicraft was by segmentation of the scribal processes, demonstrating the powers of rapid repetition to create mass production. Gutenberg wiped out scholasticism and scribal culture almost overnight. In the same manner that TV uses movies, Gutenberg used the old medieval content as his programming. Soon his technology created a new environment that altered the human sensorium drastically, providing the presses with individual authors eager to express fragmented opinions, or what we later began to call “private points of view”. Just as there was nobody in the ancient classical world to notice the effects of the phonetic alphabet and papyrus on the human psyche and social
organization, so there was nobody at the Council of Trent who noted that it was the form of printing that imposed a totally new formal causality on human consciousness. (McLuhan to MM to Robert Leuver, Jul 30, 1969, Letters 385 = M&L 90)

1970
We put the unconscious outside in the environment by simply putting everything outside at once without connections. The unconscious has everything, but it has no connections. Our new electric environment has everything but no connections. It is simultaneous but not connected. This is the unconscious, so for most people it looks like crazy, mixed-up energy. Just like the unconscious itself. We have created the unconscious outside ourselves as an environment. (Education in the Electronic Age, 1967/1970) 

1970
we live in post-history in the sense that all pasts that ever were are now present to our consciousness and that all the futures that will be are here now. In that sense we are post-history and timeless. Instant awareness of all the varieties of human expression constitutes the sort of mythic type of consciousness of ‘once-upon-a-timeness’ which means all time, out of time. (Electric Consciousness and The Church, 1970)

Since the unconscious as the complete spectrum of “formal causality” already “has everything”, it never has anything new. But human consciousness is new all the time and therefore varies, not only between each individual and all others, and not only over every individual’s lifetime, but also between different historical ages and in particular between different technological eras. These bring possibilities to consciousness which were always present but which were largely dormant because unconscious and not perceived as capabilities that might be developed.  

The parallel with chemistry is exact.  The chemical elements were always the foundation of physical materials and were always the same.  In this perspective, chemistry can be said to be timeless. But chemistry also has a history and this in two senses (leaving aside the history of the cosmic formation of matter).  First, our ways of understanding the physical world vary over time and are subject to qualitative leaps, like the one that took place in the nineteenth century culminating in Mendeleev’s Table of the elements.  Second, experimentation (particularly following the specification of the elements in the nineteenth century, but to some degree active throughout human history) leads to discoveries regarding how physical materials can be heated or mixed or otherwise manipulated to produce something new.  Of course the possibility of such innovation always existed, synchronically; but its dis-covery and applied use occurs only in historical time, diachronically.

As an example, the discovery of bronze was both something new in human history and something “ancient” — “ancient” because the potential for bronze always existed.  Once discovered, the process of bronze-making could be refined indefinitely, but the achievement could also be applied to other materials like iron.  It was, of course, exactly experimentation of this type, prior to the discoveries in the nineteenth century that eventually gave birth to modern chemistry.  A kind of proto-chemistry was practised, one of whose driving (though not necessarily explicitly posed) questions was: how does this work?

Such innovations are explosive in human history because they inexorably lead to further ones and, in the process, alter or revolutionize existing social relations. And, as McLuhan insisted, existing images of individual identity are at the same time explosively altered along with them. A kind of back and forth is initiated between objective discoveries and subjective ones, each being cause and effect of the other in turn, that progressively exposes, in small or large steps, the principles of both.

McLuhan’s proposal was just that the interior landscape be considered in similar fashion to the external one.  Here too the possibilities of human experience are timeless, “ancient”, just as the chemical elements are “ancient”. But, again like chemistry, the relation of these ancient possibilities to human consciousness is anything but clear in the beginning and can gradually become so only through an extended historical dynamic. Further, in both domains, truth is not a matter of coming to know everything there is to know in some lightening bolt moment of inspiration, it is a matter of continuous work on questions which are known to be problematic — and this in a process which has no end.

However, human beings, fundamentally unlike physical materials, are momentarily (also epochally) subject to changes in the structure of their experience depending on individual circumstances like health, mood, age, genius, etc, and on environmental circumstances like war, weather events, economic changes, etc.  It may therefore be said that human possibilities contest or quarrel in ways that chemical elements do not.

According to McLuhan, all human experience has always been generated out of this quarrel. But just which possibilities are developed out of the quarrel’s full spectrum, and what is known of this process of development, these not only vary in history, they are history! 

The electric age offers unique opportunities (and duties) to research and to shape history1 on an on-going basis. But the necessary condition of this research is recognition of the knot of synchronic and diachronic times in the genesis of human consciousness.

  1. ‘Shaping history’ in McLuhan’s sense does not entail some sort of God-like take-over or hi-jacking of being itself in the way bad readings of Hegel sometimes assert. Instead, ‘shaping history’ implies the responsibility of a creature to use its unique powers of thought and communication to order the world and itself in accord with the intrinsic dignity of that world and of all its beings. For McLuhan’s thoughts on hijacking see The hijacked world.

Espionage as the total human activity

From a Maclean’s interview in 1972 with Peter Newman:

The new human occupation of the electronic age has become surveillance. CIA-style espionage is now the total human activity. Whether you call it audience rating, consumer surveys and so on — all men are now engaged as hunters of espionage. (…) The biggest job in the world will be espionage. Around the world, people are spending more and more of their time watching the other guy. Espionage at the speed of light will become the biggest business in the world. But the CIA and the FBI are really old hat using old hardware by comparison to what’s coming, in which everybody earns pocket money by watching his own mom and dad or his brothers and sisters. (…) The possibilities of espionage are unlimited.

Anybody who followed McLuhan’s advice here to invest in Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook would be a billionaire.

Twenty years before his Maclean’s interview in his ‘Preface’ to The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan had characterized “audience rating [and] consumer surveys” as follows:

It is observable that the more illusion and falsehood needed to maintain any given state of affairs, the more tyranny is needed to maintain the illusion and falsehood. Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but, disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort. (vi)

The hijacked world

From a March 8, 1971 McLuhan letter to Jim Davey in the Prime Minister’s Office:

Realizing that the very nature of hi-jacking is related to new services and environments. I asked a New York tycoon whether there were any parallels to hi-jacking in business. He replied at once that the bigger the business, the easier it is to hi-jack it. He said that the biggest banks in the world today are being sued by their own share-holders for misallocation of funds [ie, for allowing themselves to be hi-jacked like Wells Fargo at this very moment in 2017]. The Penn Central [RR] discovered that its entire funds had been appropriated for non-transportation uses. This is done in the bookkeeping division of the firm, unbeknownst to the rest of the operation. It is almost impossible to check. Hence, the larger the operation, the less it knows about whether it is going “to land” [at its intended destination]. Cities are hi-jacked every day by developers who simply pressure the bureaucracy into “landing” in areas favorable to the developers. Countries can be hi-jacked as readily as a big business.
(…) This raises the problem of swinging blocks of votes as a form of hi-jacking. Historically, the creation of the CPR could be considered under the aspect of hi-jacking our country. Pollution is another form of taking over an entire service environment, whether of land, water or air, perverting its uses. If some private enterprise in fact uses land, water or air [for its own profit, like a billboard], it is that enterprise that becomes the content of the environment in question, just as the hold-up man on the plane, by assuming the use of the plane for himself, becomes the content of the plane by usurping the role of all the other passengers.
Since t
he user as content is not a figure of speech but a basic dynamic (…) I suggest that it can be the basis of a complete restatement of political and economic realities in the information age of the wired planet. (Letters 428)1

A contemporary article took up the same theme:

The hijacker of a plane does not presume to operate the craft. He merely decides where it is to put down. So it is today with the very largest organizations. The larger the enterprise, the easier it is to shape its patterns and destinies, unknown to the occupants and ‘owners’. (‘The Hijacking of Cities, Nations, Planets in the Age of Spaceship Earth’, Explorations [insert in University of Toronto’s Varsity Graduate], Number 30, p.110, Spring, 1971)

McLuhan saw 50 years ago what is happening today in spades — but with little enough notice. We have all been hi-jacked, but fail to register that the various components of our ‘identity’ — ‘world-order’, ‘country’, ‘tradition’, ‘individuality’, ‘privacy’ and so on — have all been taken over for uses we don’t know, never approved and certainly don’t control.

In a further letter to Davey six months later (Sept 29, 1971), McLuhan commented on this general obliviousness:

What has happened is a complete collapse of community awareness via specialism of function. As long as an operation or process is divided into sufficiently small [isolated] segments [such as ‘departments’ in government or business], nobody feels any responsibility for anything. Communal awareness has no chance to come into play. (…) The really devastating programming is the destruction of perception and sensitivity by the creation of vast environments far exceeding human scale. The King Kong fantasies are direct expressions of the feeling most people have in their environments which have become monsters. Yet, the best intentioned bureaucrats in all governments are busily engaged in creating bigger and blacker King Kongs every day of the week. (Letters 441)

30 years before in The Mechanical Bride he had already commented on this phenomenon:

One unintended effect of trying to dragoon everybody into a single monster book club has been to splinter the public into numerous fragments. Each club trying to corner the whole public has, by its particular bill of fare, witlessly caused an anti-club segment to be formed. And the more the clubs have tried telepathically to find and control the window to the public subconscious, the more they have created blind spots and indifference. (26)

  1. In a letter two weeks later, again to Davey, McLuhan suggested that “you may be specially interested in my letter on hijacking a city, a business, a country, etc. Hijacking is a process made possible by high speed travel or high speed information movement. Conglomerates are probably a form of hijacking” (McLuhan to J.M. Davey, March 22, 1971).

The show biz world

And now in the twentieth century (…) nature has been abolished by art and engineering,  (…) government has become entertainment and entertainment has become the art of government… (Nihilism Exposed, 1955)

Pop Art is an indication that as the whole planet goes inside a new satellite-and-information environment made by man, we can no longer afford to deal with the human habitat as something given to us by Nature. We have now to accept the fact and responsibility that the entire human environment is an artifact, an art form, something that can be staged and manipulated like show biz. (Great Changeovers for You, 1966)

That the entire planet should become show business on a twenty-four-hour basis is not only inevitable now, but it creates “challenges” for all levels of the establishment on a scale that will gradually obliterate consciousness. (McLuhan to Robert Leuver, Jul 30, 1969, Letters 386 = M&L 91)

Show business is taking over, and the guy who can present the best image will be the boss. This means role-playing (…) Until now, it has been private identity and ego trips. Today the new thing is to get rid of you and become whatever the situation demands. In the TV age everybody has to get rid of the self to have a job at all, whether as a teacher or a performer — you have to ditch the old private ego and start role playing. (‘An Interview With Marshall McLuhan: His Outrageous Views About Women’, Linda Sandler. Miss Chatelaine, September 3, 1974, pp. 58-59, 83-87, 90-91)

The New Criticism and plural times

Back in the 1920’s there used to be much concern about the “meaning of meaning.” At that time the discovery that the meaning was not [narrative or linear] statement so much as the simultaneous interaction of many things came as an exciting surprise. (Great Change-overs for You, 1966)1

Structuralism in all its forms is necessarily acoustic, ie, simultaneous and multi-levelled. The followers of Ferdinand Saussure divided [time]2 into diachrony and synchrony. Diachrony is the conventional historical form of scholarship and synchrony is structural analysis based on the fact that all acoustic structures have every part of them in any part at all. Personally, I acquired this synchrony through Joyce, Pound, Eliot and the new criticism, and in turn applied it to the new media. (McLuhan to Ray di Lorenzo, April 5, 1974, cited in Escape into Understanding, 432 n101)

  1. Great Change-overs for You’, Vogue 148:1, 60-63, 114-115, 117, July 1966 = ‘The All At Once World Of Marshall McLuhan’, British Vogue, August 1966. With  different titles, this article, in whole and in part, with and without changes, was republished repeatedly by McLuhan between 1966 and 1970.
  2. McLuhan wrote (ie, dictated) that “Saussure divided the acoustic into diachrony and synchrony”, which, of course, makes little sense when he had just equated the “acoustic” with the “simultaneous and multi-levelled”, ie, with the synchronic. He meant to say that Saussure divided time in this way.

Predicting the present 65 years ago

Perfection of the means of communication has meant instantaneity. Such an instantaneous network of communication is the body-mind unity of each of us. When a city or a society achieves a diversity and equilibrium of awareness analogous to the body-mind network, it has what we tend to regard as a high culture. But the instantaneity of communication makes free speech and thought difficult if not impossible, and for many reasons. Radio extends the range of the casual speaking voice, but it forbids that many should speak. And when what is said has such range of control, it is forbidden to speak any but the most acceptable words and notions. Power and control are in all cases paid for by loss of freedom and flexibility. (‘Culture Without Literacy’, Explorations 1, 1953)

McLuhan on 2017 in 1970

From an interview with Edward Fitzgerald on the CBC in 1970:1

The new electric technology has destroyed the American image of itself. The country is falling apart, physically and politically, because of the speed of information. The American bureaucracy, politics and education were set up for the very slow speeds of the printed word and railways. At electric speeds nothing in the U.S.A. makes sense. Early America smashed the mediaeval hierarchies of [corporate] loyalties and set up the individualist — the isolated man — as the material from which to construct the state. America began with the printed word and with the latest technology — the assembly line in industry and in education. With electricity all that ends. The American image of itself, American goals, American directions, have been scrapped by electric speeds. I am not making value judgments. I am simply observing that if you accelerate any structure beyond a certain speed it collapses.  Our postal systems have collapsed because of the telephone and telex. Our bureaucracies have become police states. The most benign political democracy becomes a police state as soon as you improve the speed of communication. Everybody then comes under surveillance, everybody is put into a data bank.2 There is [then] no freedom left.

  1. Excerpted in Ekistics as ‘The Gobal Theatre’, 32:190, 181-183, Sept 1971.
  2. “As we transfer our whole being to the data bank, privacy will become a ghost or echo of its former self, and what remains of community will disappear.” (‘Living at the Speed of Light’, Maclean’s, Jan 7, 1980)

Carpenter on McLuhan’s poetic conversation

All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience. (William James)1

I call this the “rear-view mirror” habit of always looking for change in the rear-view mirror; of always carefully inspecting the old situation for evidence of change. (McLuhan, ‘Education in the Electric Age’, 1967)2

He could turn a phrase and it was amazing — the capacity! He was basically a poet and he could simplify things — you’d be stunned by the brevity with which he could summarize something and I used to think, oh my god I’ve got to go write that down, and then he’d go onto the next one and the next one and soon you’d forgotten all of these. It was amazing conversation. (Ted Carpenter on McLuhan)3

Thinking proceeds along the bottom of very deep, very narrow, canyons.  A new idea in one’s own mind, or in someone else’s, may be very close by — but always at the bottom of a different canyon. So some kind of leap is required from one canyon to another over a wall of rock; and the deeper these are, the more difficult the way up, and over, and and down.

McLuhan’s talent lay in accomplishing leaps of this sort in his own mind and in the variety of ways he attempted to communicate his ancient message to others.  Understanding the man implicates the renewal of these attempts at leaping communication to, and so from, the oldest of the old.

  1. ‘The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life, 1891.
  2. Presented as ‘Education in the Electric Age’ on January 19, 1967 to the Provincial Committee on the Aims and Objectives of Education in the Schools of Ontario. Printed as ‘Education in the Electronic Age’ in Interchange, 1:4, 1-12, 1970; also in The Best of Times/The Worst of Times: Contemporary Issues in Canadian Educationeds, Hugh A. Stevenson, Robert M. Stamp, and J. Donald Wilson, 1970.
  3. ‘Edmund Ted Carpenter 2011 —  On Marshall McLuhan and Explorations’, Interview on YouTube at 6:43ff.

The question of the “objective correlative”

In a previous post, McLuhan’s goal and the means to that goal were set out as a continuation of the symbolist attempt to specify “art conditions for art emotion” in an “inclusive image”1:

the central difference between romantic or picturesque poetry and modern symbolist poetry was that whereas the landscape poets from Thomson to Tennyson were engaged in manipulating an external environment as a means of evoking art emotion, after Poe, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, the symbolists turned to the manipulation of an interior landscape, a paysage intérieur, as the means of controlling art emotion or of exploring the aesthetic moment. This amounted to a considerable revolution — from natural conditions for art emotion to art conditions for art emotion. (The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry, 1951)

As McLuhan was fully aware, his account of the transition from romantic to symbolic poetry grew out of Eliot’s notion of the “objective correlative” from his 1919 Hamlet essay:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. (T.S. Eliot, ‘Hamlet and His Problems’, 1919)

In McLuhan’s view, the Romantics had followed the Newtonian specification of “the external facts” absent consideration of the subjective conditions needed to reach it.  This objective definition, however, then “evoked” (or so the intention was) the “experience” of the subject that the artist intended.  The advance of the Symbolists was to take subjective conditions into explicit account.

Here is McLuhan in ‘Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry’ from 1951 (the same year as his ‘Aesthetic Moment’ essay cited above):

At the end of the epoch of picturesque [or Romantic] experiment and exploration there is Cezanne in painting, and Rimbaud in poetry. That is, the impressionists began with sensation, discovered ‘abstraction’, and achieved, finally, a metaphysical art. The picturesque begins with work like Thomson’s Seasons, in the search for significant art-emotion amid natural scenes and it achieved plenary realization in Rimbaud’s metaphysical landscapes — Les Illuminations. The early Romantics sought aesthetic emotion in natural scenes; the later Romantics confidently evoked art-emotion from art-situations. The early Romantics ransacked nature, as the Pre-Raphaelites did literature and history, for situations which would provide moments of intense perception. The Symbolists went to work more methodically. As A.N. Whitehead showed, the great discovery of the nineteenth century was not this or that fact about nature, but the discovery of the technique of invention so that modern science can now discover whatever it needs to discover. And Rimbaud and Mallarmé, following the lead of Edgar Poe’s aesthetic, made the same advance in poetic technique that Whitehead pointed out in the physical sciences. The new method is to work backwards from the particular effect to the objective correlative or poetic means of evoking that precise effect, just as the chemist begins with the end product and then seeks the formula which will produce it. Mr. Eliot states this discovery, which has guided his own poetic activity since 1910 or so, in his essay on Hamlet: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”2

Beyond the Eliot “objective correlative” quotation here in the context of McLuhan’s take on the history of post-Newtonian art and science, note should be made of a critical ambiguity in this passage. McLuhan writes of “the objective correlative or poetic means of evoking (…) precise effect” and compares this to a chemical “formula which will produce” some particular material or “end product”. But while the latter goal is exactly not subjective and may therefore be used in mechanized production, the former is avowedly subjective: it is, as McLuhan follows Eliot in expressing, the evocation of a certain “emotion”. However, “poetic means” or “poetic activity” is then explicitly equated with “the objective correlative” (“the objective correlative or poetic means”) which, according to Eliot, consists in “a set of objects” and even of “the external facts” evidenced by the poet.

It seems that the poet uses objective means to achieve a subjective goal, while the chemist uses subjective means (chemical theory) to achieve an objective goal.  The intention is, however, precisely to deny this sort of raw distinction between the objective and the subjective in the direction of an “inclusive image” of their interrelation. Indeed, it is just for this reason that Whitehead’s description of “the discovery of the technique of invention (…) in the physical sciences” was seen by McLuhan to apply equally to “the same advance in poetic technique” made by Rimbaud and Mallarmé

Central to this ambiguous account is what McLuhan calls “poetic means” and what Eliot calls “the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art”. These phrases may be translated as “poetic technique” and as “the only technique of expressing emotion in the form of art” in order to illuminate the relation of McLuhan’s account in this Tennyson essay to a passage in a letter he wrote to Pound shortly thereafter:

I know exactly what you mean . But I found out the hard way. Too late. Your own tips are always exact. But they are of little help to the uninitiated. Once a man has got onto technique as the key in communication it’s different. But somehow the bugbear of content forbids that anybody be interested in technique as content.3

McLuhan made a series of points here which were to define his work for the next 30 years:

  • content always implicates some means or technique or medium which has enabled it to be what it is
  • the medium is therefore “the key in communication” of any sort: artistic, scientific, or, indeed, simply linguistic — oral, written or otherwise signaled
  • since human beings are defined among living things by their distinctive ability to communicate, the whole history of the human species may be said to turn on media
  • but the study of media is rendered difficult (and, so far, impossible) by “the bugbear of content” which somehow obscures the very technique (or means or medium) that has enabled it
  • Part of the difficulty implicated in such study is its self-reference: the question arises what medium must be engaged to enable the investigation of media?
  • the symbolist quest to define “the inclusive and integral image” must therefore be continued as the only way to enable perception of content and medium together and so enable their investigation together in a new domain, or domains, of scientific investigation

These points, in turn, suggested certain problems McLuhan had to address together with some potential answers to those problems:

  • how to point out (un-obscure) what required study: how illuminate “technique as content“? Potential answer: use obvious ‘media’ (newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, etc etc) as analogues to the foundational media that are the elementary “key in communication”  
  • how to specify such foundational media? Potential answer: use co-variant binary relations as Einstein had done in physics4
  • how to seed awareness of this way to augment human self-knowledge as a survival tool?  Potential answer: use the obvious ‘media’ of newspapers, magazines, radio and TV to propagate the possibility5

 

  1. “The Romantics (…) insisted upon the creative imagination as the birthright of all, and began a ceaseless quest for the inclusive and integral image. This arduous search was taken up with great intensity by the Symbolists who realized that it could not be a merely visual image, but must include all the senses in a kind of dance. En route to this discovery, Hopkins and Browning, Poe and Baudelaire, ended the print-fostered dichotomy between author and reader, producer and consumer and swept mostly unwilling audiences up into participation in the creative act. After Poe, and since Cezanne, poets and painters devised ever new modes of speaking not to their readers and viewers, but through them. (…) Such is the meaning of the abstract art and the do-it-yourself kits which artists have for a hundred years been carefully preparing for this affronted public.” (New Media and the New Education, 1960)
  2. McLuhan cites this same passage from Eliot in ‘Media Alchemy in Art and Society’ (1958), ‘The Electronic Age – The Age of Implosion’ (1962), and The Gutenberg Galaxy, 277.
  3. McLuhan to Pound,  July 16, 1952, Letters 231. Emphases in the original.
  4. “The victory over the concept of absolute space or over that of the inertial system (fixed frame of reference) became possible only because the concept of the material object was gradually replaced as the fundamental concept of physics by that of the field. Under the influence of the ideas of Faraday and Maxwell the notion developed that the whole of physical reality could perhaps be represented as a field whose components depend on four space-time parameters. If the laws of this field are in general covariant, that is, are not dependent on a particular choice of coordinate system, then the introduction of an independent (absolute) space is no longer necessary. That which constitutes the spatial character of reality is then simply the four-dimensionality of the field.” (Einstein, ‘Foreword’ to Max Jammer, Concepts of Space, cited in Laws of Media, 41)
  5. This accorded with McLuhan’s understanding of the education process that he had reached already in Winnipeg (age 22): “It is, of course, mistaken to suppose that education in any important sense is connected with the schoolroom. Education is the sum total of all those ideas and objects pressing in on the mind every hour of the waking day.” (‘Public School Education’, The Manitoban, Oct 17,1933)

Patterson: “no interest in biases of space and time”

McLuhan research is full of inaccuracies and ridiculous claims.  Even such a thoughtful writer as Graeme Patterson (1934-1993) blithely made observations which were simply ludicrous.  Here he is in History and Communications (1990):

Outside of his introductions to Innis’s work, [McLuhan] took no interest in biases of space and time. (122)

 A good argument could be made that McLuhan never thought about anything else.

McLuhan to Overduin on water and fish

In an undocumented quotation, but apparently from a 1971 letter to Henry Overduin1 which was excerpted at length on the preceding page, Graeme Patterson cites McLuhan as follows:

In such surrounds, or all-enveloping situations, most people see the “content” or the figure rather than the ground in which the figure is placed. A fish may see other other fish but never see water.2

  1. Hendrik (Henry) Overduin (1942-2008) was a Canadian who had been head of the Department of Mass Communication at McNeese State University in Louisiana before retiring back in London (ON) where he continued teaching as an adjunct professor at the University of Western Ontario.
  2. Graeme Patterson, History and Communications, 1990, 120, apparently from a November 1, 1971 letter to Henry Overduin in the McLuhan papers in the Ottawa archive. Cf Patterson, p234, n20.

William James on the “free water of consciousness”

From Psychology: Briefer Course (1892):

It is, the reader will see, the reinstatement of the vague and inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to press on the attention.  Mr. [Francis] Galton and Prof. [T.H.] Huxley have (…) made one step in advance in exploding the ridiculous theory of Hume and Berkeley that we can have no images but of perfectly definite things. Another is made if we overthrow the equally ridiculous notion that, whilst simple objective qualities are revealed to our knowledge in ‘states of consciousness’, relations are not. But these reforms are not half sweeping and radical enough. What must be admitted is that the definite images of traditional psychology form but the very smallest part of our minds as they actually live. The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow. It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it.

 

Language and experience

The reason that Joyce considered Vico’s new science so important for his own linguistic probes, was that Vico was the first to point out that a total history of human culture and sensibility is embedded in the changing structural forms of language. (McLuhan to Robert Leuver, Jul 30, 1969, Letters 384; also, Medium and the Light 89)

McLuhan took it, along with a long tradition, that language is what distinguishes human beings from other beings. It followed that if we want to know what human being is, we must learn what language is. But if language and human experience were interrelated from the start (“the first stage of apprehension is already poetic” as McLuhan wrote Pound already in 1951, Letters 229), the analysis of experience as an analogous mode of investigation to linguistic analysis lay close at hand.

Now the exercise of language may be analyzed as presupposing choices among available ‘contesting’ sounds and grammatical markers.  But these ‘choices’ are, of course, neither conscious, in the main, nor situated in normal time and space.  When we speak, these choices have always already been made — but when and where and by whom they have been made remains utterly obscure.

McLuhan studied human experience in a comparable way:

it is impossible that there could ever be a scientific concept that is not embedded in the vernacular tongue of the scientist, and that has not been embedded there for many centuries. You cannot conceive a form of scientific hypothesis which is not part of your own language, implicit in that language. All the mathematics in the world are externalizations of certain linguistic patterns. What the poets were saying — now more widely appreciated — was that the language itself embodies the greatest body of scientific intuition possible. The proportionalities in things, and between things and our senses, and so embodied in language itself, are inexhaustible. The particular technology of a time releases some of that inexhaustible store of analogical intuition and experience which IS language. So television releases within language a whole body of resources which has been bound up there for centuries. But this does not depend upon concepts. It has to do with sensibility and observation — analogical perception, right in the structure of language itself. ‘Communications and the Word of God’, 1959)1

All of man’s artifacts are structurally linguistic and metaphoric. This discovery, unknown to anybody in any culture, would justify a book without any other factors whatever. Remember the [James] Watson autobiography of his discovery of the double helix in the DNA particle? Literally speaking, this breakthrough about the linguistic structure of all human artifacts is incomparably larger and deeper-going. I am, myself, unable to grasp the implications. Certainly it means that the unity of the family of man can be seen, not as biological, but as intellectual and spiritual. (McLuhan to Barbara Rowes, April 29, 1976)2

The model of explanation at work here is that of experiential phenomena as figures overlying their ground (just as chemistry, say, envisions physical materials as figures overlying the chemical elements as their ground). This is already a two-fold structure. But just as chemical elements, in turn, have further structure of their own (the ratio of protons and electrons, say), so McLuhan imagined that the grounding elements of language and experience are themselves structured:

Structuralism as a term (…) [designates] inclusive synesthesia, an interplay of many levels and facets in a two-dimensional mosaic. (GG, 230)

This, he said, was the

principle of a continuous dual structure for achieving order. (Spiral — Man as the Medium, 1976, 126)

“Continuous” in this context is multi-dimensional:

  • there are no experiential phenomena which lack ground — that is, everything experienced is a figure for which grounding is always in place, ‘continually’…
  • the structure of ground is ‘continuous’ in another sense, as, for example. a sample of pure gold, although having a single elementary structure, is not one atom but a great many atoms, each with the same ‘continuous’ structure…
  • if such material is to cohere, as a pure gold nugget (say), or as a compound lump or mixture of many elements, there must be a further structure ‘continually’ holding these repeated atomic structures together…

The explanatory structure of experience McLuhan had in mind was therefore dynamic in many ways: between figure and ground, between the poles (eg, eye and ear or space and time) of the experiential elements, and between the experiential elements themselves. Any of these might be flipped at any time.  The key was exposed, as McLuhan wrote in the very first words of his very first paper in January 1936, “when it is seen that there are two principal sides to everything…” (‘G. K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic’).

 

 

 

  1. Address at St. Michael’s College, August 1959, in the Medium and the Light, 33-44.
  2. Cited in Gordon, Escape into Understanding, 224.

Dagwood and the ineradicable roots of our being

it will be interesting to ask a few questions and to offer some answers to those questions which will illuminate our daily lives. (Dagwood’s America, 1944)

Increasingly, I feel that Catholics must master C.G. Jung. The little self-conscious (…) area in which we live to-day has nothing to do with the problems of our faith. Modern anthropology and psychology are more important for the Church than St. Thomas to-day. (McLuhan to Walter Ong and Clement McNaspy, Christmas 1944, Letters 166)

[In the] retroactive not yet (…) every moment is radically new only to the extent that it is utterly ancient. (…) Hence, what comes to be is what has always been, the same difference that perpetually recurs as differently the same. (Elliot Wolfson)1

After finishing his PhD thesis in 1943, McLuhan turned to consider the practical ramifications of its suggestion that there are three forms of being and of knowing, which three forms “contest” or “quarrel” in all human experience.2 In his thesis, the history of these forms over the two thousand year period between classical Greece and Elizabethan England had been treated in terms of the trivium (dialectic-grammar-rhetoric). The hypothesis was that all possibilities of being and of knowing are inherent in language and that these possibilities may be grouped into the three genera of the trivium — like proton-neutron-electron or solid-liquid-gas or mineral-animal-vegetable in the natural world.

On the one hand, investigation of the practical implications of the quarreling forms could work to clarify and to demonstrate this hypothesis and potentially help to ameliorate individual and social problems in a novel way. On the other, human freedom and self-knowledge could be promoted, quite aside from any practical ramifications, by illuminating how momentary ‘choices’ or ‘identifications’ or ‘preferences’ are always being made regarding the perpetual contest of forms, deciding it now in this way and now in that. On this understanding, humans ‘create’ identity, not out of nothing, but by associating themselves with pre-existing forms which they activate in various ways — like playing a piano to fashion a melody, not of sound, but of identity3:

Every human being is incessantly engaged in creating an image of identity for himself4

These were ‘choices’ which were left in obscurity for the most part and were therefore made only unconsciously and mechanically.  McLuhan would attempt to lift this obscurity. In 1944 his almost 10 year voyage to The Mechanical Bride (1951) — like his later 10 year voyages to The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and to Take Today (1972) — was underway.

The title of his 1944 talk, ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’ (published at the start of 1946) named the project upon which he was then embarked: the study of the contemporary world through the lens of this threefold contest of forms. His 1944 paper, ‘Dagwood’s America’,5 was one of his first attempts to bring forward this investigation:

Dagwood, our Mr Everyman, is the residual legatee of a century during which the masculine ideal of noble being has been systematically destroyed by the base ideal of endless doing. Men are now increasingly aware of their plight [or, at least, increasingly collide with their plight] because endless doing has involved them in unsolvable frustrations. For the accumulated heritage of unrestrained tycoons and predatory power-gluttons has led us into a vast suburban swamp [not to speak of the planetary swamp of the then raging WW2] from which few can ever emerge sane and wholeThe map which can alone lead Dagwood out of this swamp is the image of his lost masculine ego. That image he can now recover only by taking thought. He could, of course, find It quickest of all in healthy and fructifying work, but unfortunately he must wait to invent this work until after he has rediscovered the ineradicable roots of his own being. But he can never discover nourishment for these roots in popular art and literature6 

Life with a strong wife and four daughters would soon enough cure McLuhan of expressing himself in terms of “the masculine ideal of noble being”. But the fundamental idea at stake here (one he thought men were chiefly responsible for bringing about and must therefore be chiefly responsible for repairing)7 was that modern humans, not ‘only’ men, had become fragmented to the point of insanity: they were neither “whole” nor “sane”. The cause of this fragmentation, in turn, was their not “taking thought” concerning “the ineradicable roots of [their] own being”. Hence, “an unofficial blackout” now prevailed “over the spiritual and intellectual areas of [human] nature” —  “areas” which ought to be concerned with such “roots of [our] being” but, in the event, have been left unattended and vacant. Human beings had thereby become “alienated from the entire framework” both of their own selves and of life in general. Further, having in this way lost “the detached use of autonomous reason for the critical appraisal of life”, they had been left “totally without the means of locating the cause or cure of [their]  disturbances and frustrations.”

Since “means” = “medium”, and since rediscovery of the missing “means of locating the cause or cure of [their] disturbances and frustrations” entailed, first of all, learning to access and accord with such “means”, McLuhan was already at work on “understanding media”. The book of that title would be published a full 20 years later.

The male chauvinism all too easily found in McLuhan’s article indicates that McLuhan was unclear at this time (and perhaps never gained decisive clarity) about how to describe the relation of human individual and social existence with its roots.8 The result was that he jumped between talk of ‘men’ as sorry creatures in everyday family life and ‘man’ as an “image”, as an “ideal”, as a “form”, as a type of “ego”, as a “role”, and even as a kind of experienced “world”: Dagwood and his fellow characters in the comics were said by McLuhan to be “poised between two worlds — between a masculine and a feminine world”.

But that such an image or form or ego type or role or world can dominate a woman as much as it can a man is clear from McLuhan’s description of Blondie:

Blondie is efficiently masculine, purposive, ego­tistical and hard, just as Dagwood is ineffectually feminine, altruistic and sensitive. She has assumed, superficially, the masculine role just in proportion as he has lost it. (…) How did this come about? How did Dagwood forfeit his masculine ego and thereby force Blondie to take up the social slack by herself becoming masculine? For justice forces us to recognize that American women are not to blame for the collapse of the masculine role in society. They are eager to resume the feminine role… 

Finding a way to describe elementary roots in themselves and in their relation to the everyday world was a fundamental problem (and today remains a problem) which McLuhan’s project needed to clarify and solve. In a comparable way, chemistry once needed to learn the difference between gold, silver, iron, mercury, tin, copper, sulfur, etc, as elements and as familiar physical materials. Same name — but completely different ‘stuff’! The latter can be pointed out just like a tree or a house; the former are ideal and function in an explanatory economy whose beginning and further advance depend upon creative insight and whose practical application requires special training.

At the same time as it was learning to isolate its elements, chemistry also had to demonstrate itself through practical applications (like all the new manufacturing techniques invented through it in the nineteenth century, such as those for paint and gunpowder). As McLuhan commented regarding the relation of cartoons to “American life” (with emphasis added):

Somehow the [ideal] patterns of behavior in Dagwood’s home [in the funnies] reflect the interests and experiences of millions of readers. This reflection may or may not be direct.

This admittedly problematic “reflection” derived from the fact that Dagwood exactly as a popular cartoon character was an ideal form or archetype. McLuhan called him “our Mr Everyman” (anticipating — or reflecting even at this early date? — his study of HCE in Finnegans Wake). Dagwood, he said, is a “basic fascination of millions of readers”:

The uninterrupted popularity of Dagwood’s miseries since 1930 entitles him to be considered as a nationally appointed symbol of something in our lives. Somehow the patterns of behavior in Dagwood’s home reflect the interests and experiences of millions of readers. 

nobody would read Chic Young [the Dagwood cartoonist] unless his comic strip portrayed some basic pattern or conflict of American life.

Dagwood is Mr Everyman in America today.

But that we have no idea how to relate such an archetype to our living is exactly the central point of McLuhan’s article.

Part of the problem is that we fail to perceive such “basic patterns” as “basic patterns” . They are too big and too dominant in our lives even to register:

a form so huge that it can no longer be taken in9

Further, this “blackout” prevailing “over the spiritual and intellectual areas of [human] nature” entailed that the very idea of such principles working as “basic pattern” in our experience was unimaginable. Even what they might mean in our lives remained utterly obscure.

To “be taken in”, such forms needed to be illuminated and studied.  This was just what McLuhan proposed:

it will be interesting to ask a few questions [about Dagwood and the comics in general] and to offer some answers to those questions which will illuminate our daily lives.

But the presupposition of such illumination and study was, according to McLuhan, the detached use of autonomous reason for the critical appraisal of life”. “Detached”, “autonomous” and “critical” here name a reason that studies the “roots of [our] own being” in themselves — without distorting admixture from the ordinary world (aka from the rear-view mirror). Hence, as touched on above, the task he faced was very much like that of chemists throughout the nineteenth century when the chemical elements needed to be extricated from an admixture of ordinary materials (so, for example, air, water, fire and earth had to be shown to be complex mixtures and not elements).  But how was this to be possible?  How study the roots of human being on their own?10 Further, since an important part of the required demonstration would lie in practical applications of a clarified notion of elementary roots in the ordinary world, how differentiate the former purification from the latter application to what is always mixed and impure?

One of the keys to McLuhan’s reflections on Dagwood lies in the phrase, ‘ineradicable roots’. Since ‘radix’ is ‘root’ in Latin11, ‘in-e-radic-able roots’ means ‘un-up-root-able roots’. The roots, plural, of human being are always present and cannot be uprooted or, even less, eradicated. An implicated question of enormous import follows: how it is possible for modern humans to be “alienated from the entire framework” of both their own selves and of life in general (a condition that, recognized or unrecognized, has increasingly prevailed for centuries) if they are always rooted?  How can utter rootlessness somehow at the same time be rooted?

How can the world be consumed as it is by nihilism — and yet remain grounded in “the ineradicable roots of [its] being”?

McLuhan’s answer to this question may be found in the context of his contention that the comics, as a kind of contemporary mythology, presented characters “poised between two worlds — between a masculine and a feminine world”. Characters from the comics, this was to say, were situated along an “axis” or spectrum of “worlds” (forms”, “ideals”, “ego” types, “roles”, etc) — worlds which could be described in terms of ‘gender’, but also in many other ways. (‘Gender’ in the realm of forms is fundamentally different from gender in everyday life. That we have lost the ability to perceive this difference is an index of the nihilism in which we are ensnared.)

Dagwood, as decidedly feminine and childish12 in the archetypal sense of these, and as “a nationally appointed symbol”, revealed at once that, as a whole nation, in fact as a global civilization, “America has swung very far toward the feminine pole of the axis“. 

This “axis” of forms/roles/ideals/worlds was McLuhan’s lifelong topic. His contention was that all individual and social experience derives from these forms just as language derives from phonemes or physical materials from chemical elements.  Now each position along this axis is a binary structure: the very first words of McLuhan’s very first paper were: “When it is seen that there are two principal sides to everything…”.13 Since such a binary structure of “two principal sides” characterizes the principles themselves,14 everything we experience in the ordinary world and also the relation between principles and the ordinary world are binary as well. But it is all important to realize (possible in regard to principles only through the exercise of “autonomous reason” which has “detached” itself from any particular principle) that binary structures deploy themselves in a complex set (or “axis”) of expressions. Set out in terms of gender15, the range of these expressions may be put as follows:

male/female……(male-female or female-male)……female/male

The denominator here (underlined) indicates dominance, emphasis, stress, preference. The middle position where there is no denominator or where both are denominators (male-female or female-male) indicates a balance of the two in what in contemporary physics is called a ‘superposition’. One-sided emphasis and dominance increases in both directions from the middle position towards the two ends of the axis, over an indeterminate (or at least undetermined) number of forms, such that the denominator in each case tends to overwhelm the numerator. The two sides therefore tend to merge to become all female and all male monisms:

male/female => female alone

female/male => male alone

Structurally these fundamentally opposed sides show the same tendency to monism and it is exactly this monistic tendency of both of the ends of the axis of ideal forms that allowed McLuhan to trace rootlessness and nihilism to — fundamental roots. Monism of any sort is first of all a principial or fundamental determination.

In this way, nihilism exactly as nihilism, as a ‘world’ fundamentally cut off from God, truth, meaning and from any and all traditions, may be perceived to express — “the ineradicable roots of [its] being“. In so doing, nihilism as the utter extreme of rootlessness, in which even the “apparent world” has been abolished (as Nietzsche showed), equally reflects the foundational grounding of the world in its “roots” at all times and all places. For if the utterly alienated and undifferentiated extremes are grounded in “ineradicable roots“, how not all less extreme positions?

A decade after ‘Dagwood’, McLuhan in ‘Nihilism Exposed‘ (a review of Hugh Kenner’s monograph, Wyndham Lewis) had advanced his thinking about the “axis” or “spectrum” of ideal forms to the following:

it is precisely the courage of Lewis in pushing the Cartesian and Plotinian angelism to the logical point of the extinction of humanism and personality that gives his work such importance in the new age of technology. For, on the plane of applied science we have fashioned a Plotinian world-culture which implements the non-human and superhuman doctrines of neo-Platonic angelism to the point where the human dimension is obliterated by sensuality at one end of the spectrum, and by sheer abstraction at the other. (…)  And now in the twentieth century when nature has been abolished by art and engineering, when government has become entertainment and entertainment has become the art of government, now the gnostic and neo-Platonist and Buddhist can gloat: “I told you so! This gimcrack mechanism is all that there ever was in the illusion of human existence. Let us rejoin the One“. This pagan unworldliness carried to its ultimate mystical point is what makes the work of Lewis so intense and his evaluation so fearless.

Instead of the gender typology in the Dagwood article, McLuhan here put forward several different characterizations of the “axis” or “spectrum” of ideal forms:

superhuman/non-human……human……non-human/superhuman

abstraction/sensuality……human dimension……sensuality/abstraction

In other contexts he submitted many other characterizations like:

dialectic/rhetoric……grammar…… rhetoric/dialectic
(Nashe thesis)

archetype/cliché……cliché-archetype interplay……cliché/archetype (From Cliché to Archetype)

In all cases, the extremes tend to monism.  But the middle position of dynamic interplay (eg, sensuality and abstraction together, the human dimension, grammar, etc) does not.  The middle position therefore has no impulse to obliterate the extreme poles of these axes: it represents a relaxation of their opposition into a differentiated harmony. Although fundamentally opposed to those poles, the middle position just as much finds peace with them despite their aggressive difference from it and from each other. Of course, what these oppositions are at peace is fundamentally different from what they are at war. But it is the very essence of the middle position that fundamental difference can at the same time be harmonious.

This is another reason that McLuhan was able to perceive the modern world engulfed as it is in nihilism — as yet grounded. This is the the secret of inequality or ‘the main question‘.

It follows that McLuhan’s account of Dagwood as the story of the genesis of the modern world may be told as follows:

  • Dagwood has “somehow” come to identify himself with the ‘female’ archetypal organizing principle of matter, sensuality and rhetoric16
  • in fact, he has identified himself so strongly with this archetype (= advanced so far out from the centre of the archetypal spectrum towards this pole) that monism as the “logical point of the extinction” of any rival archetype, and, indeed, of the whole archetypal level of existence, has come to structure his entire experience
  • this monism has so merged the everyday world and its archetypal roots that these roots as a whole (including his identification ‘there’ with the ‘female’ pole) have become subject to “blackout”
  • at the archetypal level, this monism has cut him off from all the contesting principles along its axis, and especially from the ‘male’ pole of abstraction at its other end that alone might ground and motivate “the detached use of autonomous reason for the critical appraisal of life”
  • but were Dagwood to ‘flip’ to identify with the extreme end of the male pole as the mirror image of his existing ‘female’ position, he would still be subject to the same “endless” monism — a monism that IS his problem — but now dominated by endless fixation, instead of “endless doing”
  • it is this monism of both ends of the archetypal spectrum that has effected the “unofficial blackout (…) over the spiritual and intellectual areas of [human] nature” — “areas” which are concerned with nothing else but the various “root” positions along the archetypal spectrum
  • in this way, Dagwood’s “blackout” has “alienated [him] from the entire framework” — an “entire framework” that includes the practical everyday level with the archetypal level together (in their fundamental difference) and, along the archetypal axis, with the entire range of its positions all together (in their fundamental difference from each other)
  • as a result, Dagwood “has no rational purpose in life” and “no directing principle of order and creative activity in him” — for “purpose”, “directing principle of order” and “creative activity” derive (like anything else) only from the archetypal level and to this he has lost all access
  • he has been left totally without the means of locating the cause or cure of his disturbances and frustrations” which lies in his unknown (subject to “blackout”) original identification made on the archetypal level with the extreme end of the sensuality segment of its “axis”
  • his problem is how to “emerge sane and whole” again. Sane — in touch also with his “autonomous reason”. Whole — in touch not merely with the practical world of “unlimited doing”, but also with the complete spectrum of the archetypal axis where, alone, his “autonomous reason” is both grounded and potentially motivated
  • Dagwood is thus subject to the aporia of the “hermeneutical circle” where what he most needs to do (get back in touch with his roots) presupposes action that is already rooted: “the map which can alone lead Dagwood out of this swamp is the image of his lost masculine ego”
  • both the difficulty and the solution to Dagwood’s problem (and therefore to his regaining his sanity and integrity) lie in the event which has been subject to “blackout”: his extreme monistic ‘choice’ on the spectrum of archetypal roots that fundamentally excludes him from being in touch with that spectrum and, therefore, with any possibility along that spectrum — even the one he has identified himself with!
  • therefore, and all importantly, interrogation of this “blackout” itself provides the only “map which can alone lead Dagwood out of this swamp”
  • expressed in terms of time, Dagwood needs to take a future action into his past in order to unveil the possibilities of a new present he already witnessed ‘there’ in making his existing ‘choice’ — but in “blackout” mode
  • McLuhan’s constant attack on the rear-view mirror may in this way be seen as principled and similarly with his “ceaseless quest for the inclusive and integral image” — the former is a mechanical and unconsciousness attachment to an uncritical archetypal ‘choice’ and the latter is a new ‘choice’ at the middle of the archetypal spectrum giving access, for the first time, to the archetypal and everyday worlds together

Over the next 15 years, McLuhan would describe the “retracing” of the labyrinthine “stages of cognition” over and over again in an attempt to illuminate the knots of time and space at stake here. And over the next 35 years he would recur over and over again to the mariner in Poe’s Descent into the Maelstrom as an exemplar of “every human being (…) incessantly engaged in creating an image of identity for himself”, or herself, through a moment-to-moment katabasis into the “worldpool” of the genesis of cognition. Becoming conscious of this process was, he thought, a matter of survival:

The artist’s insights or perceptions seem to have been given to mankind as a providential means of bridging the gap between evolution and technology. The artist is able to program, or reprogram, the sensory life in a manner which gives us a navigational chart to get out of the maelstrom created by our own ingenuity. The role of the artist in regard to man and the media is simply survival. (Man and Media, 1975)17

Poe’s “Descent into the Maelstrom” has structurally much in common with the vortices of the Cantos. [Pound’s] “Sargasso Sea” is a vortex that attracts multitudinous objects but which also tosses things up again in recognizable patterns which serve for survival. Survival for Poe’s sailor had meant attaching himself to one of the recurring objects in the whirlpool. The same strategy applies to Pound’s readers who need to be alert to the resonance of recurring themes. (Pound, Eliot, and the Rhetoric of The Waste Land, 1979)

These were some of McLuhan’s last reflections on the maelstrom. The outstanding question was (and remains today) whether consciousness of this “providential means of bridging the gap” can be brought about (if at all) through any other way than the shock and horror it took in the mariner’s case “to change these hairs from a jetty black to white, to weaken my limbs, and to unstring my nerves”.

 

 

  1.  Elliot R. Wolfson, ‘Retroactive Not Yet: Linear Circularity and Kabbalistic Temporality, in Time and Eternity in Jewish Mysticism: That Which is Before and That Which is After, ed Brian Ogren, 2015
  2. Being and knowing: ‘knowing’ in some way is, while being is in some way known. But how to understand the relation of being to knowing and of knowing to being is the circular riddle defining the modern world — to mention only the modern world.
  3. Of course, just ‘who’ it is playing this piano before identity is a question which on no account can be left unposed!
  4. McLuhan letter to R.J. Leuver, July 30, 1969, Letters 386. To repeat, ‘who’ performs such identity creation is a difficult and mysterious matter – along with its ‘when’ and ‘where’ and ‘how’.
  5. ‘Dagwood’s America’, Columbia Magazine, January 1944, pp 3 & 22.
  6. This and all citations below without attribution are from ‘Dagwood’s America’.
  7. If, however, any ‘blame’ is owing for this grotesque family pattern, it is Dagwood’s. It is he who has collapsed, not Blondie. (…) Dagwood made (modern America), and Dagwood alone can restore balance to a completely, lop-sided social life…”
  8. The effort to get clear about the relation between phenomena and their underlying determinants (eg, elements in chemistry, laws in physics, DNA structure in genetics, etc) is exactly what leads to the birth of a new science through the specification of its domain.
  9. So the Dagwood essay; but similarly McLuhan 25 years later in a letter to R.J. Leuver: “When a new problem becomes greater than the human scale can cope with, the mind instinctively shrinks and sleeps” (July 30, 1969, Letters 386).
  10. The ‘fly in the fly-bottle’ problem here (the idea that we can never get out of subjective factors in order to relate to objects ‘purely’), may be seen, in McLuhan’s terms, as a symptom of Dagwood’s loss of “the detached use of autonomous reason”: “Dagwood, our Mr Everyman, is the residual legatee of a century during which the masculine ideal of noble being has been systematically destroyed by the base ideal of endless doing.” Later he would further trace the problem to a related and equally unconsidered preference for ‘matching’ over ‘making’, hence to a general failure to conceive of communication between finitude (aka, a limitation to making) and truth, hence to nihilism.
  11. Cf English words like ‘radical’ and ‘radish’.
  12. In Dagwood we see not only defeat but docility and oblivion, He seems not to have any recollection of what constitutes a man’s’ world or masculine interests. He lives in a vacuum, isolated from all contact with men, save men of his own kind. In his world Blondie and her children are supreme. Nothing else exists. Totally deprived of the prerogatives of a father, not aware of the need or even the possibility of impersonal masculine authority in the home, he has become hungry for affection and understanding; and in order to obtain these there is no pose of childish irresponsibility and petulance which he fails to assume.” The Dagwood paper sees masculine childishness as extending to the whole culture: “The press, the pulps, the slicks, and Hollywood — it is a great nursery world of sensations, thrills, and wide-eyed child-like myopia.”
  13. ‘G. K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic’, 1936.
  14. One of the variations on ‘Giants’ in FW is ‘Joynts’ (FW 15.7).
  15. As observed above, it is essential to differentiate ‘gender’ (or anything else) as describing beings “in the world” from specifications using the same names for archetypal structures below or before the world. This differentiation is exactly the cervical path that every science takes on the way to its birth.
  16. McLuhan would come to address the question of this ‘somehow’ in terms of the triumph of “visual space” or “acoustic space” over their superposition of both together. The former implicated exclusive binary oppositions and exclusive binary oppositions implicated monistic preference for one of the two. Matter, sensuality and rhetoric had become the usual governing monism in modern America and, by extension, in the modern world. But previously, the rival monism of “sheer abstraction” had often held sway and still held sway in pockets of the modern world. Swinging between opposing monistic dominants in this way was exactly the signature of the Gutenberg galaxy.
  17. This lecture appears in Understanding Me, but is is mistakenly attributed there to 1979.

Patterson on McLuhan’s acquaintance with Innis

Like nearly all researchers of the Toronto school, Graeme Patterson took McLuhan at his word that he

began to read the late work [of Innis] only after he was made curious by learning that The Mechanical Bride had been placed on the reading list of one of Innis’ courses in political economy. (History and Communications,1990, 29)

Patterson relies here on McLuhan’s mistaken recollection of events going back 30 years, which he made when he appeared with Eric Havelock in October 1978 at a memorial for Innis held at the University of Toronto’s Innis College. The publication of Havelock’s address from that occasion, Harold A Innis: A Memoir (1982), has a short preface by McLuhan (‘The Fecund Interval’) in which he says:

My own acquaintance with Innis began when I heard that he had put my book, The Mechanical Bride, on his course reading list. It intrigued me to know what sort of academic would take an interest in this book, I read his Bias of Communication and became a follower of Harold innis from that time. (10)

None of this makes sense. McLuhan described his acquaintance with Innis as beginning with his reading The Bias of Communication (which would have been sometime in 1951 at the earliest, since the book was first issued that year).  But before this, Innis would hardly have had the time to read The Mechanical Bride (which itself was issued early in 1951) and to assign it for one of his courses. Moreover, as Patterson was well aware, McLuhan’s letter to Innis from early that year (if not from the end of 1950)1 already discusses Innis’ 1950 Empire and Communications — so McLuhan’s “acquaintance with Innis” certainly did not begin with his reading Innis’ Bias of Communication. 

Further, McLuhan had participated with Innis in a seminar in 1949 and Tom Easterbrook had brought the two of them together for a meal (and for further unattested discussions?) in 1948.2

 From McLuhan’s mistaken memory Patterson deduced that:

Long before encountering Innis [McLuhan] had written [in the Preface to The Mechanical Bride]: “Ever since Burckhardt saw that the meaning of Machiavelli’s method was to turn the state into a work of art by the rational manipulation of power, it has been an open possibility to apply the method of art analysis to the critical evaluation of society.” (History and Communications, 34) 

While some of The Mechanical Bride may indeed have been written before McLuhan came to know Innis late in 1948 (or already in 1947 when his old friend Easterbrook returned to teach with Innis in the UT political economy department), its ‘Preface’ was almost certainly written after.

  1. The published letter from McLuhan to Innis from March 1951 was a “rewrite”. Innis’ answer to the original letter was dated February 26, 1951, and apologized for a delayed response.
  2. For discussion of the 1949 ‘values seminar’ see ‘The ‘Values Discussion Group’ of 1949′ (http://mcluhansnewsciences.com/mcluhan/2013/09/values-discussion-group-1949/); for the 1948 meal, see McLuhan to Lewis Mumford, December 28, 1948, Letters 208.

Easterbrook to Innis on the “juxtaposition of unlikes”

Graeme Patterson‘s excellent History and Communications (1990) records a late exchange between McLuhan’s old Winnipeg buddy1 Tom Easterbrook, and Easterbrook’s mentor, colleague and close friend at UT, Harold Innis:

In the spring of 1952, when [Innis] was dying of cancer, the economist W.T. Easterbrook wrote to him about his own “current preoccupation with McLuhan’s ‘juxtaposition of unlikes’ (…) It is a method not at all uncommon in your own writings, but it is only recently that I have begun to see its possibilities. It is the only way I know out of the dilemma of narrative vs ‘scientific’ history.”
“I agree with you”, replied Innis, “about the importance of juxtaposition along the lines suggested by McLuhan. It seems to offer the only prospect of escape from the obsession with one’s own culture, but of course needs to be carefully considered since, while one’s own views of one’s culture change as a result of looking at other cultures, nevertheless the problem of objectivity always seems to emerge.” (28, with notes 8 and 9 to this passage on  p 229)

As described in ‘Innis and McLuhan in 1936’2 Innis had long been ambiguous about the prospects of scientific rigor in the social sciences.  He seems to have remained so until his death. But Easterbrook, at least, could see that the simultaneous double perspective or juxtaposition method that McLuhan was advocating (mainly from his reading of Eliot and Pound) did offer such a prospect — but exactly not by extricating itself (per impossibile) from finitude, either in the performance of the subject or in the knowledge of the object. Instead, finitude might be perceived and exercised as itself juxtaposed with truth — however ‘unlikely’ such an “inclusive image” might seem in some perspectives. But how else could we have all the sciences that we do? Or, indeed, how else could we have all the routine familiarity we have in going about our everyday lives?

Later in History and Communications, Patterson tied Innis’ reply to Easterbrook to his reading of the following passage from The Mechanical Bride:

The cultural patterns of several societies, quite unrelated to one another or to our own, are abruptly overlayered [in contemporary anthropology like that of Margaret Mead] in cubist or Picasso style to provide a greatly enriched image of human potentialities. By this method the greatest possible detachment from our own immediate problems is achieved. The voice of reason is audible only to the detached observer. (3)

Patterson commented:

It was this method of achieving “the greatest possible detachment”, it would appear, that Innis had in mind in making his strange reply to Easterbrook. (35)

“Detachment” was  certainly one of “the conditions of freedom of thought” sought by Innis.  But what Innis did not live long enough to understand in McLuhan (let alone to affirm with McLuhan) was the compatibility of “unlikes” even when their “juxtaposition” were taken to the extreme of “the greatest possible detachment”.  This extreme compatibility of “unlikes” was at the heart of McLuhan’s “ceaseless quest for the inclusive image” and of his Catholic persuasion.

 

 

  1. Like most scholars of the Toronto school, Patterson either did not know of McLuhan’s long-standing intimate friendship with Easterbrook — or he ignored it.  But this friendship was a central factor in the Innis-McLuhan relationship and, of course, in the whole Culture and Communication seminar project where Easterbrook was one of the five faculty leaders (three from Winnipeg!). An acknowledgement in The Mechanical Bride (1951) reads: “To Professor W. T. Easterbrook I owe many enlightening conversations on the problems of bureaucracy and enterprise.” By 1951, these had been on-going, irregularly, for almost 25 years. Easterbrook’s relationship with Innis was not as long-standing as with McLuhan, but it did go back almost 20 years itself and had developed into a very close friendship. Innis’ ‘Preface’ to Empire and Communications (1950) acknowledges Easterbrook’s help with the manuscript and it was Easterbrook who took over Innis’ course on communications in 1951 when Innis was no longer able to teach it.
  2.  http://mcluhansnewsciences.com/mcluhan/2016/09/innis-and-mcluhan-in-1936/

McLuhan’s realism 10: Pound on the ideograph

The “New Learning” under the ideogram of the mortar1 can imply whatever men of my generation can offer our successors as means to (…) comprehension. (Guide to Kulchur)

ABC of Reading:

Fenollosa’s essay was perhaps too far ahead of his time to be easily comprehended. He did not proclaim his method as a method. He was trying to explain the Chinese ideograph as a means of transmission and registration of thought. He got to the root of the matter, to the root of the difference between what is valid in Chinese thinking and invalid or misleading in a great deal of European thinking and language. The simplest statement I can make of his meaning is as follows: In Europe, if you ask a man to define anything, his definition always moves away from the simple things that he knows perfectly well, it recedes into an unknown region, that is a region of remoter and progressively remoter abstraction. Thus if you ask him what red is, he says it is a ‘colour ‘. If you ask him what a colour is, he tells you it is a vibration or a refraction of light, or a division of the spectrum. And if you ask him what vibration is, he tells you it is a mode of energy, or something of that sort, until you arrive at a modality of being, or non-being, or at any rate you get in beyond your depth, and beyond his depth.
(…)
By contrast to the method of abstraction, or of defining things in more and still more general terms, Fenollosa emphasizes the method of science, ‘which is the method of poetry’, as distinct from that of ‘philosophic discussion ‘, and is the way the Chinese go about it in their ideograph or abbreviated picture writing.
(…)
In tables showing primitive Chinese characters in one column and the present ‘conventionalized’ signs in another, anyone can see how the ideogram for man or tree or sunrise developed, or ‘was simplified from’, or was reduced to the essentials of the first picture of man, tree or sunrise.
Thus:

But when the Chinaman wanted to make a picture of something more complicated, or of a general idea, how did he go about it? He is to define red. How can he do it in a picture that
isn’t painted in red paint? He puts (or his ancestor put) together the abbreviated
pictures of

ROSE                    CHERRY
IRON RUST          FLAMINGO

(…)
The Chinese ‘word’ or ideogram for red is based on something everyone KNOWS. (19-22)

*****

Guide to Kulchur:

The week before last one of the brighter scholars still professed ignorance of the meaning of “ideogramic”. I must try once again to define that term (…) Ernest Fenollosa attacked, quite rightly, a great weakness in western ratiocination. He pointed out that the material sciences, biology, chemistry, examined collections of fact, phenomena, specimens, and gathered general equations of real knowledge from them, even though the observed data had no syllogistic connection one with another. (…) The first knowledge is direct, (…) it affects every perception…
Coming even closer to things (…)
And herein is clue to Confucius’ reiterated commendation of such of his students as studied the Odes. He demanded or commended a type of perception, a kind of transmission of knowledge obtainable only from such concrete manifestation. Not without reason. The whole tone, disposition, Anschauung of Confucius recommending the Odes, of Confucius speaking of music, differs fundamentally (…) from the way the unfortunate (…) occidental usually supposes… (27-29)

The ideogramic method consists of presenting one facet and then another until at some point one gets off the dead and desensitized surface of the reader’s mind, onto a part that will register.(…) To put it yet another way: it does not matter a two-penny damn whether you load up your memory with the chronological sequence of what has happened, or the names of protagonists, or authors of books, or generals and leading political spouters, so long as you understand the process now going on, or [rather] the [plural] processes biological, social, economic now going on, enveloping you as an individual, in a social order, and quite unlikely to be very “new” in themselves however fresh or stale to the participant. (50-51)

CIVILIZATION (…): to define it ideogramicly we may start with the “Listening to Incense”. This displays a high state of civilization. In the Imperial Court of Nippon the companions burnt incense, they burnt now one perfume, and now another, or a mixture of perfumes, and the accomplishment was both to recognize what had gone materially into the perfume and to cite apposite poems. The interest is in the blend of perception [hear/smell] and of association [physical/mental]. It is a pastime neither for clods nor for illiterates. (79)

*****

For Pound (and the same would be true of McLuhan), human beings are directly in touch with the things in their environment. We KNOW things perfectly well.  But among the things we KNOW is the fact that the surface of things is not all there is to them. The same sort of direct communication we have with things also holds between their surface and their depth. This is why we can have something like science or why some have what is called ‘deep insight’ into social or historical events.

Understanding the world for Pound and McLuhan presupposed the exercise of both of these kinds of realism.

  1. The Chinese character for learning.

Writing and the Alphabet in Innis and McLuhan

McLuhan’s ‘The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry’ (1951) was reprinted in The Interior Landscape, indicating McLuhan’s evaluation of its importance along his pathway. Here is to be found:

With Joyce words syntactically ordered to statement yielded to words as pantomime, as ballet, and especially as static landscape. Mallarmé, in his Coup de Des, had preceded Joyce in establishing the printed page as a symbolist landscape able to evoke the most ephemeral incident and, simultaneously, the most remote cycles of time. For Mallarmé, as for Joyce, the minutest, as well as the most esoteric, features of the alphabet itself were charged with dramatic significance, so that he used the word and the printed page as do the Chinese, for whom landscape painting is a branch of writing.1

This was an understanding of print and of time and of their interrelation that would occupy him for the remaining three decades of his life. The printed page as “syntactically ordered (…) statement” could be taken not — or not only! — as the continuous ABCDE unfolding of a lineal message, but also as an ABCEDminded2 “static landscape”, or snapshot, in which time itself was figured in it from “the most ephemeral3 incident” to “the most remote cycles of time” and its ground, “simultaneously”. The emerging idea was that print, exactly in its multiple (and by no means only negative) limitations (arbitrarily isolated atomic units configured in serial order and all that this implied for history and consciousness) could be perceived as revealing at the same time an entirely different time-space order (“words as pantomime, as ballet (…) charged with dramatic significance”).

McLuhan had been thinking about the implications of particularity for decades4, but now he began to sense, in what amounted to a second conversion, that incarnation had no limit. There was nothing that could not also be beheld as expressing an entirely different order and this relationship between orders was precisely that “inclusive and integral image” to whose specification he had been elected.5 Reflecting back to this time around 1951 in his Playboy interview, he recalled:

For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride, I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. I loathed machinery, I abominated cities, I equated the Industrial Revolution with original sin and mass media with the Fall. In short, I rejected almost every element of modern life in favor of a Rousseauvian utopianism. But gradually (…) I ceased being a moralist and became a student. As someone committed to literature and the traditions of literacy, I began to study the new environment that imperiled literary values, and I soon realized that [the new media and popular culture] could not be dismissed by moral outrage or pious indignation. Study showed that a totally new approach was required, both to save what deserved saving in our Western heritage and to help man adopt a new survival strategy. (Playboy Interview)

Remarkably, this “totally new approach” did not represent an exclusive break with the past, but a revolutionary accommodation with it that was inclusive. The “totally new” was a reversion or, as McLuhan often put it, a “retracing”, that accorded itself to the light coming through all things including “environmental technology”, “the Industrial Revolution”, “mass media” and  “modern life” in general. In a word, he adopted in regard to the universe of human experience the posture of a proto-chemist who determined to begin studying all materials across all their manifestations and interactions.

A footnote to the passage cited above from ‘The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry’ and concluding with “landscape painting is a branch of writing”, referred to:

A.C. Moorhouse, Writing and the Alphabet, London, 1946, p. 59.

Presumably McLuhan had found this reference the year before reading Innis’ Empire and Communications .  It appears in a footnote to p 10 of its ‘Introduction’:

See C. L. Becker, Progress and Power (Stanford University, 1936); see also A. C. Moorhouse, Writing and the Alphabet (London, 1946).6

Now the year 1951 was of great significance to McLuhan: he turned 40; The Mechanical Bride was finally published; his turn to Joyce was completed as defined that year in his ‘Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process’; his correspondence with Ezra Pound (backed by his study of the Cantos and of Pound’s critical writings) was flourishing; his relationship with Innis was taking off (only to be cut short by Innis’ early death in 1952); he was beginning to investigate the roles of media in culture as reflected in his letter to Innis from March that year and as detailed in his advanced summary of “the end of the Gutenberg era” in his letter to Pound7 in July 1952 (reflecting ideas he had come to, in the main, in 1951).

Moorhouse’s book with its chapter on the Chinese may have been an important marker in this context. Its page 59 referenced by  McLuhan has this extended passage (going over to page 60):

Calligraphy has always been held in the highest esteem in China : indeed, landscape-painting is really to be regarded as a branch of writing, and landscapes often include written texts from poems on account of the beauty of the script as much as for literary reasons. Our alphabet has in comparison a plain and matter-of-fact appearance. But there are more practical reasons [for comparing the two]. The Chinaman who has learnt to read is equally at home with a government notice of to-day and with the literature that reaches back for over three thousand years. The writing is materially the same, though the language is not. Now this is a most peculiar situation. Contrast what happens with a phonetic system of writing. In ancient Greek there is a period of only five or six centuries between Homer and Aristotle, [not the three thousand of the Chinese,] yet the language changed considerably in that time. The student who knew only the Greek of Aristotle would find himself at once in difficulties with that of Homer, in respect of the vocabulary, the sounds and the grammatical forms. His difficulties would all arise out of distinctions in the spoken form of the language: and since the writing is based on the spoken form, and simply reproduces all the distinctions, it can do nothing to remove them. Admittedly Greek is an extreme example, because of its great diversity. We can, however, see a similar result in English. It is impossible for us, without special training, to read and understand Beowulf, or even Chaucer: their language is different, and therefore so is the written form [reflective] of it. The Chinese language [as represented in its script], on the other hand, has not undergone such striking changes (…) [even though] the process of sound change has created a number of modern Chinese dialects, which are sufficiently unlike to prevent the speakers of one of them from readily understanding the others, or the ancient texts, when spoken aloud. This is where the value of Chinese writing makes itself felt, by transcending the speech barriers. Thus the writing allows the Chinaman (if he can read at all) to enjoy the knowledge of his ancient texts — a knowledge which has [practical] significance in Chinese life that is not easy for us to estimate.

Moorhouse brings together writing as “landscape-painting” (script and art), different time dimensions determined by the translucence (or not) of script and art, east and west and the importance of “transcending the speech barriers” to the appropriation of (or by!) culture. All of these (though of course not deriving only from Moorhouse) would be critical to McLuhan in the coming decade (and, in fact, for the rest of his life).

On the same page of Empire and Communications just above his note referencing Moorhouse, Innis formulated one of the most important passages in his book:

The significance of a basic medium to its civilization is difficult to appraise since the means of appraisal are influenced by the [different] media [employed by it, on the one hand, and by us, on the other], and indeed the fact of appraisal appears to be peculiar to certain types of media. A change in the type of medium implies a change in the type of appraisal and hence makes it difficult for one civilization to understand another. (…) The difficulties of appraisal will be evident, particularly in the consideration of time. With the dominance of arithmetic (…)  modern students have accepted the linear measure of time. The dangers of applying this procrustean device in the appraisal of civilizations in which it did not exist illustrate one of numerous problems. The difficulties will be illustrated in part in these six lectures in which time becomes a crucial factor in the organization of material and in which a lecture is [used self-consciously as] a standardized and relatively inefficient method of communication with an emphasis on dogmatic answers rather than eternal questions. I have attempted to meet these problems by using the concept of empire as an indication of the efficiency of communication. It will reflect to an important extent the efficiency of particular media of communication and its possibilities in creating conditions favourable to creative thought. (10)

Here, too, media are brought together with different time dimensions and “type[s] of appraisal”. These, in turn, are seen to give access to, or to block access to, “eternal questions” and “creative thought.” Innis then goes beyond Moorhouse in noting how these considerations reflect back on his own lectures and on the “appraisal” that is possible in them for himself and through them for his audience.

What Innis did not see in Moorhouse, however, was the importance of the introduction into this context of “landscape-painting”. It was precisely this point that McLuhan would emphasize in his programmatic letter to Innis early in 1951:

it was most of all the esthetic discoveries of the symbolists since Rimbaud and Mallarmé (developed in English by Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Lewis and Yeats) which have served to recreate in contemporary consciousness an awareness of the potencies of language [understood in Moorhouse’s broad sense as including script and, therefore, art], such as the Western world has not experienced in 1800 years. (…) The discontinuous juxtaposition of unrelated items (…) created, [Mallarmé] saw, a symbolic landscape of great power and importance. (…) The same symbolist perception applied to cinema showed that the montage of images was basically a return via technology to age-old picture language. Eisenstein’s Film Forum and Film Technique explores the relations between modern developments in the arts and Chinese ideogram, pointing to the common basis of ideogram in modern art, science and technology. (…) From the point of view of the artist however the business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered [like Innis’ “dogmatic answers”], but a direct participation in an experience [of “creative thought” about “eternal questions”]. (…) The fallacy in the Deutsch-Wiener [cybernetics] approach [shared by Innis?] is its failure to understand the techniques and functions of the traditional arts as the essential type[s] of all human communication. (…) Arts here used as providing criteria, techniques of observation, and bodies of recorded, achieved, experience. Points of departure but also return. For example the actual techniques of [McLuhan’s proposed] common study today [between, eg, the physical sciences, social sciences, humanities and artists] seem to me to be of genuine relevance to anybody who wishes to grasp the best in current poetry and music. And vice versa.

Problems of communication, aka of “understanding media”, were implicated, this was to say, both in the best modern art works and in any attempt to restore harmony in the universe of human thought and action.

 

  1. Compare: “Whereas the ethical world of Ulysses is presented in terms of well-defined human types the more metaphysical world of the Wake speaks and moves before us with the gestures of being itself. It is a nightworld and, literally, as Joyce reiterates, is “abcedminded.” Letters (“every letter is a godsend”), the frozen, formalized gestures of remote ages of collective experience, move before us in solemn morrice (dance). They are the representatives of age-old adequation of mind and things, enacting the drama of the endless adjustment of the interior acts and dispositions of the mind to the outer world. The drama of cognition itself. (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial, 1953)
  2. See note above. For discussion see ‘Abcedmindedness’ http://mcluhansnewsciences.com/mcluhan/2016/10/abcedmindedness/).
  3. Etymologically, ‘eph-emeral’ = ‘of a day’.
  4. See ‘McLuhan’s realism 4’: Meredith and “mystical materialism” (http://mcluhansnewsciences.com/mcluhan/2017/06/mcluhans-realism-4/).
  5. See McLuhan and the “ceaseless quest for the inclusive image”: http://mcluhansnewsciences.com/mcluhan/2017/07/mcluhan-and-the-ceaseless-quest-for-the-inclusive-image/.
  6. Footnote 16 to p 10 of the 1950 edition of Empire and Communications. Carl Becker, 1873-1945, was professor of politics at Minnesota and Cornell. Alfred Charles Moorhouse, 1910-2000, was professor of Greek at University College, Swansea.
  7. McLuhan to Pound, July 16, 1952, Letters 231-232.

McLuhan’s times

Tradition (…) cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves in the first place the historical sense (…) which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and the temporal together (…) And it is at the same time [at the same time!] what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity. (Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919, frequently cited by McLuhan beginning with ‘Eliot’s Cubist Aesthetic’ in 1947)1

‘Change’ is (…) generally believed a single-gauge track. It is not a single-gauge track at all. It is a multitudinous field of tracks… (Lewis, Paleface, 1929, 122)

*

Loose note found in McLuhan’s copy of the University of Toronto Quarterly, 19:2, January 1950:

We can only correct the bias of the present time by coming to know it is a time, not the time.2

*

‘The Analogical Mirrors’, 1944:

He must overcome and be overcome at the same instant — at every instant.3

The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry‘, 1951:

the Symbolists [took] aesthetic experience as an arrested moment, a moment in and out of time4, of intellectual emotion for which in their poems they sought the art formula by retracing the stages of apprehension which led to this moment. 

‘Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process’, 1951:

The moment of arrest is an epiphany, a moment not in time’s covenant,5 and it is by the bringing of complex perceptions to a focus in such moments that the minotaurs of the labyrinths are always overcome.

‘Wyndham Lewis: His Theory of Art and Communication’, 1953

“The world of the ‘pure Present’ of the Classical Ages is obviously the world that is born and dies every moment.”6

‘Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press’, 1954:7

That manipulation of a continuous parallel between modern Dublin and ancient Ithaca which Mr. Eliot has noted as the major resource of Ulysses was a transfer to the time dimension of a “double-plot”

‘Space, Time, and Poetry,  Explorations 4, 1955:

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 begins:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

Here the “time of year” (…) is visualized swiftly in three different ways in the second line and then a fourth and fifth time in the third and fourth lines.8 

‘New Media in Arts Education’, 1956, on Rimbaud’s poem “Dimanche”:

The organization of experience here is orchestral or acoustic rather than visual. Yet the various units of experience are visualized. There is a landscape, but it includes more than one space in its space and more than one time in its time. It is a simultaneous order such as music readily offers. A merely visual landscape, however, can offer only one space at one time.9

Coleridge as Artist, 1957

Yet if the artistic process must always be the same, the conditions of art and the artist are always changing.

Coleridge as Artist, 1957

The Coleridgean awareness of the modes of the imagination as producer represents an enormous extension of the bonds of human sympathy and understanding, socially and historically. Coleridge wrote to Wordsworth On the Night After His Recitation of a Poem On the Growth of An Individual Mind:

The truly Great
Have all one age, and from one visible space
Shed influence!

This has more than a neo-Platonic doctrinal interest at the present time when the instantaneity of communication between all parts of the world has brought into involuntary juxtaposition the whole diversity of human cultures.  What century is it today in Peking or Jerusalem or Moscow? Yet the very speed of communication between these entities so discontinuous in space, time, and experience makes for a simultaneity in which lineal history is abolished by becoming present.

The Little Epic, late 1950s:10

Language itself and every department of human activity would in this view be a long succession of ‘momentary deities’ or epiphanies.  And such indeed is the view put forward in the Cratylus of Plato: I believe, Socrates, the true account of the matter to be, that a power more than human gave things their first names, and that the names which are thus given are necessarily their true names. In this way etymology becomes a method of science and theology. William Wordsworth called these momentary deities ‘spots of time’, Hopkins called them ‘inscapes’ and Browning built his entire work on the same concept of the esthetic of the ‘eternal moment’. 

Tennyson and the Romantic Epic, 1960:

Looking back from the nuclear age it is easy to recognize the pattern of ‘total field’ forming in the concern with totality of implication in the aesthetic moment, or spot of time.

Tennyson and the Romantic Epic, 1960:

Digression is the principal artistic device by which little epic exists. The reason for this is quite simple. To transcend time one simply interrupts the natural flow of events.

The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962, p 14 (citing Georges Poulet):

“For the man of the Middle Ages, then, there was not one duration only. There were durations, ranked one above another, and not only in the universality of the exterior world but within himself, in his own nature, in his own human existence.”11

The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962, p 249-250:

James Joyce certainly thought he had found in Vico a philosopher who had some better cultural awareness than those moved by the “Cartesian spring.” And Vico, like Heidegger, is a philologist among philosophers. His time theory of “ricorsi” has been interpreted by lineal minds to imply “recurrence.” A recent study of him brushes this notion aside.12 Vico conceives the time-structure of history as “not linear, but contrapuntal. It must be traced along a number of lines of development“. For Vico all history is contemporary or simultaneous, a fact given, Joyce would add, by virtue of language itself, the simultaneous storehouse of all experience. And in Vico, the concept of recurrence cannot “be admitted at the level of the course of the nations through time”: “The establishment of providence establishes universal history, the total presence of the human spirit to itself in idea. In this principle, the supreme `ricorso’ is achieved by the human spirit in idea, and it possesses itself, past, present, and future, in an act which is wholly consonant with its own historicity.” 13

Understanding Media, 1964, p 152:

plurality-of-times succeeds uniformity-of-time

The Medium is the Massage, 1967, p 63:

Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness14. ‘Time’ has ceased, ‘space’ has vanished. We now live in a global village…a simultaneous happening.

‘Education in the Electronic Age’, 1967:

Everything happens at once. In the new painting and the new art and the new literature, it is a happening. A happening is an all-at-once situation. There is no story line. We are all engaged in a happening; everything happening at once. That is what a happening is. It is not one thing at a time but everything at once.15

Retrieval-Retribal in the Electronic Age, 196716

this phrase that I wrote on the board, ‘the heliotropical (k)not time’, refers to the TV image as a sun radiating at the viewer, helio tropical, turning us all toward the eastern sun; (k)not time, meaning all times are simultaneous now. All cultures are simultaneous. There is no time that fills our focus. Many times, all times, just as in a dream, at night, nighttime. All that we ever were, collectively, is now simultaneous. There is no longer an historical time, there is only a (k)not time left to mankind or a nighttime or a dream world. The old visual time, like clock time, is fragmented and segmented into little bits. That is what we call time, time marches on — but [now we perceive time as] also backwards, sideways, up and down. But to the print man, time simply matches on, there isn’t any other direction possible for the print man. But for the ear man, time moves in all directions simultaneously.17

Through the Vanishing Point, 1968, p 55:

If the three-dimensional illusion of depth [in Western European art] has proved to be a cul-de-sac of one time and one space, the two-dimensional [in Eastern art] features many spaces in multileveled time.

Through the Vanishing Point, p 103:

The Shakespearean moment (“that time of year”)18 includes several times at once

Through the Vanishing Point, p 195:

[Dylan] Thomas’ poetry is a chamber simultaneously echoing with many times.

Through the Vanishing Point, p 221:

In an electronic world where all-at-onceness is inevitable and normal, we have rediscovered an affinity for the discontinuity of Oriental art and expression19

Counterblast, 1969

the omnipresent ear and moving eye

‘Electric Consciousness and The Church’, 1970:

we live in post-history in the sense that all pasts that ever were are now present to our consciousness and that all the futures that will be are here now. In that sense we are post-history and timeless. Instant awareness of all the varieties of human expression constitutes the sort of mythic type of consciousness of ‘once-upon-a-timeness’ which means all time, out of time.

‘Theatre and the Visual Arts’, 1971:

Without static you have no continuity.

Culture is our Business, 1972 Introduction:

The climate of advertising responds instantly to any social change, making ads in themselves an invaluable means of knowing “where it’s at”. The phrase [“where it’s at”] not only concerns a focal image, but expresses a kind of “consensuality” of persons, places, and things in a single instant of awareness. Invented in the age of rock music to indicate areas of relevance and aliveness, the phrase conveys a resonant and acoustic kind of awareness quite alien to anything like “clock time”.20  

Spiral — Man as the Medium, 1976:

Chronological time yields to time as spaced-out moments of [simultaneous] intensity.

Global Village, posthumous, p 10:

time considered as sequential (left hemisphere) is figure and time considered as simultaneous (right hemisphere) is ground.

Global Village, p 45:

Acoustic and visual space structures may be seen as incommensurable, like history and eternity, yet, at the same time, as complementary…a foot, as it were, in both…

 

 

  1. ‘Eliot’s Cubist Aesthetic’ was never published. The same passage from Eliot was cited by McLuhan over 30 years later in ‘Pound, Eliot, and the Rhetoric of The Waste Land’ (1979).
  2. Transcribed by Andrew McLuhan in his inscriptorium blog. Emphasis added here. The tone and date of this note point in the direction of Harold Innis.  Already in 1942 Innis had written: “The concepts of time and space must be made relative and elastic and the attention given by the social scientists to problems of space should be paralleled by attention to problems of time” (Journal of Economic History, December 1942, reprinted in Political Economy in the Modern State, 1946, p 34). And in 1948: “The Chinese concept of time (…) as plural (…) reflects their social organization with its interest in hierarchy and relative stability” (The Press: a neglected factor in the economic history of the twentieth century, 1948, reprinted in Changing Concepts of Time, 1952, p 94), emphasis added. Finally in 1951: “I was particularly interested in the discussion of the problem of time since I have been wrestling with this subject over a considerable period and I was very much struck by your suggestion that it was linked with the problem of power” (Innis to Eric Havelock, 8 December 1951, cited in Liss Jeffrey’s thesis, 208.). For “not the time”, compare McLuhan in his 1947 proposal for Robert Hutchins: “Every age has its reigning analogy in terms of which it orients itself with respect to the past and directs its energies through the present to the future. To be contemporary in the good sense is to be aware of this analogy. To be “ahead of the time” is to be critically aware of the analogy. That is, to be aware that it is only one analogy.”
  3. Compare to Counterblast 25 years later in 1969: “the omnipresent ear and moving eye”.
  4. “A moment in and out of time”: unmarked quotation from Eliot’s Four Quartets, iii: ‘The  Dry Salvages’.
  5. “Not in time’s covenant”: another unmarked quotation from Eliot’s Four Quartets, iv: ‘Little Gidding’.
  6. Citation from Lewis, Time and Western Man, 1927. Lewis continues: “It is not the time-world (…) but the space-world…
  7. Published in The Sewanee Review in 1954, but first submitted to it in 1951.
  8. See Through the Vanishing Point, p 103 (in this post above).
  9. Compare McLuhan on romantic poetry: “It had to deal with one emotion at a time and one level of experience at a time”. (Review of The Romantic Assertion, 1960)
  10. Unpublished manuscript in the Ottawa archive.
  11. The same Poulet passage is quoted in Through the Vanishing Point.
  12. A. Robert Caponigri, Time and Idea: The Theory of History in Giambattista Vico, 1953.
  13. Time and Idea, p. 142
  14. ‘All-at-onceness’ (McLuhan’s usual spelling) implicates plural times. This is seldom or never understood and yet is foundational to his intentions. See the passage above from Through the Vanishing Point, p 221.
  15. However, “everything at once” of course implicates “one thing at a time” as well.
  16. Seminar at Fordham University in November 1967.
  17. Compare Frank Budgen on Joyce’s Wake: “Finnegans Wake is going nowhere in all directions on an every-way roundabout with intrusions from above and below. On every page Joyce insists upon this all-time dream-time.” (‘Joyce’s Chapters on Going Forth by Day’, Horizon, September 1941.) McLuhan frequently cited this passage from Budgen, with and without attribution.
  18. See the citation from ‘Space, Time, and Poetry’ above.
  19. “All-at-onceness” and “discontinuity” (of, eg, times) belong together because a plural “all” requires the differentiation of its components.
  20. “Clock time”: the evolutionary metaphor that haunts the mind” (McLuhan to Ted Carpenter, January 26, 1972, Letters 450.)

McLuhan and the “ceaseless quest for the inclusive image”

In ‘New Media and the New Education’ (1960) McLuhan submitted that “the Romantics (…) began a ceaseless quest for the inclusive and integral image”. He himself was heir to this same quest.  For there was no other way than in and through such an “inclusive and integral image” to understand the complications of a world where all spaces and all times were simultaneously present. And where, above all, there was no other way than through such an “inclusive and integral image” to reawaken and renew a consciousness of God.

Already in 1951 he had described “symbolic vision” or “inclusive consciousness” as “the juxtaposition without copula of diverse and even paradoxical situations or states of mind” (Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry, 1951). But what could be more “paradoxical” than a world consumed by nihilism that made sense, not through transformation into something else, but in the utter extreme of its dislocation exactly as it was?

Beyond (or before) the revolutionary bent of a simultaneous electric world, McLuhan recognized a “human craving for an inclusive auditory organization of many-layered and interpenetrating experiences”1 that was timeless — or, at least, that was subject to multiple times and therefore that was not only chronological: “a moment in and out of time” (as McLuhan cited Eliot). Without such a “craving”, like the stag for the running stream as Psalm 42 has it, how else could God ever have been known and worshipped in a world that was at no time without its small and large tragedies or lacking in recurrent overwhelming senselessnesses?

Thus it was that McLuhan took the symbolists as continuing the “ceaseless quest for the inclusive and integral image” of the romantics and his own task within this tradition as being the further unfolding of its insights and aims:

the central difference between romantic or picturesque poetry and modern symbolist poetry was that whereas the landscape poets from Thomson to Tennyson were engaged in manipulating an external environment as a means of evoking art emotion, after Poe, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, the symbolists turned to the manipulation of an interior landscape, a paysage intérieur, as the means of controlling art emotion or of exploring the aesthetic moment. This amounted to a considerable revolution — from natural conditions for art emotion to art conditions for art emotion. (The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry, 1951)

the Symbolists [took] aesthetic experience as an arrested moment, a moment in and out of time2, of intellectual emotion for which in their poems they sought the art formula by retracing the stages of apprehension which led to this moment.” (Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry, 1951)

The Romantics (…) insisted upon the creative imagination as the birthright of all, and began a ceaseless quest for the inclusive and integral image. This arduous search was taken up with great intensity by the Symbolists who realized that it could not be a merely visual image, but must include all the senses in a kind of dance. En route to this discovery, Hopkins and Browning, Poe and Baudelaire, ended the print-fostered dichotomy between author and reader, producer and consumer and swept mostly unwilling audiences up into participation in the creative act. After Poe, and since Cezanne, poets and painters devised ever new modes of speaking not to their readers and viewers, but through them. (…) Such is the meaning of the abstract art and the do-it-yourself kits which artists have for a hundred years been carefully preparing for this affronted public. (New Media and the New Education, 1960)

Like the symbolists in their transformation of the romantic quest, McLuhan’s goal was to set out a kind of prolegomena to the apprehension of an “inclusive and integral image” through which that image might again be dis-covered and beheld – and applied. What he called “the art formula”. Audience participation was required, not only because this image was necessarily not that of any individual perspective (not that of the artist nor that of any of the artist’s consumers), but above all because the goal was to communicate the means through which perception of “the inclusive and integral image” might be enabled. And this required complex transformation in the audience just as it had first of all required complex transformation in the artist attempting its specification.

[Romantic] poetry, too, [like science following Newton], succeeded in achieving a new visual order based on the correspondence between the inner faculties and the natural scene outside. But this new order was exclusive rather than inclusive in its very nature. It had to deal with one emotion at a time and one level of experience at a time. It could not include erudition and accumulated past experience in the single perspectives of visual space that were devised in order to isolate and to control single emotions. But, above all, it could not fulfill the human craving for an inclusive auditory organization of many-layered and interpenetrating experiences. (Review of The Romantic Assertion, 1960)

the electronic mode of shaping situations reveals its bias towards field structure. But even “field”, preferred by physicists, can mislead by suggesting a flat, single plane. But a multi-dimensional field is intended, an ”everyway roundabout with intrusions from above and below”. Thus, for example, point-of-view, if inevitable in print culture, is alien to electronic ‘field’ and the affiliates of such [a] ‘field’. (New Media and the New Education, 1960)3

Sense might be made of the world, once again, and in particular of the Christian tradition, but only through a revolution in our understanding of sense in the “every-way roundabout with intrusions from above and below” of its shape(s).4

  1. ‘Review of The Romantic Assertion‘,1960
  2. Without attribution, McLuhan cites Eliot here from The Four Quartets (The  Dry Salvages).
  3. New Media and the New Education, 1960, citing (without attribution) Frank Budgen, ‘Joyce’s Chapters on Going Forth by Day’, Horizon, September 1941. McLuhan cited this same passage more extensively a decade before in 1951 in ‘The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry’: “The worst (difficulty) of writing about Finnegans Wake (said Budgen) is that all our words are wrong. Story is wrong, of course, for a story is one thing happening after another along a one-way time street, coming from and going to some place, whereas Finnegans Wake is going nowhere in all directions on an every-way roundabout with intrusions from above and below. On every page Joyce insists upon this all-time dream-time by every device of suggestion and allusion and by a continual modification and cancellation of all-time words.” Where McLuhan consistently has ‘intrusions’, Budgen has ‘infiltrations’.
  4. The great problem implicated in “a revolution in our understanding of sense” was, of course, that “understanding” for McLuhan was already a certain configuration of sense. There could be no such revolution unless it had already occurred! This knot in time of a ‘future past’ was therefore both a central feature of the sought “inclusive and integral image” and its pre-liminary precondition — that which first had to be in place for it first to be.

McLuhan’s Google Doodle

On McLuhan’s birthday July 21 (2017) he got a Google Doodle:

The doodle images symbolize the acoustic age, the written age, mass production (Fordism), McLuhan television appearance, the Global Village and the electronic age.

https://www.google.com/doodles/marshall-mcluhans-106th-birthday

Marshall McLuhan’s 106th Birthday

Long before we started looking to our screens for all the answers, Marshall McLuhan saw the internet coming — and predicted just how much impact it would have. A Canadian philosopher and professor who specialized in media theory, McLuhan came to prominence in the 1960s, just as TV was becoming part of everyday life. At the center of his thinking was the idea that society is shaped by technology and the way information is shared.

Today’s Doodle, which celebrates the visionary’s 106th birthday, illustrates this theory by showing how McLuhan viewed human history. He saw it through the lens of 4 distinct eras: the acoustic age, the literary age, the print age, and the electronic age. His first major book, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), popularized the term “global village” — the idea that technology brings people together and allows everyone the same access to information.

In Understanding Media (1964), McLuhan further examined the transformative effects of technology and coined his famous phrase “The medium is the message.” He believed that the way in which someone receives information is more influential than the information itself. Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, McLuhan made frequent TV appearances to share his theories with both followers and skeptics.

Decades later, we honor the man whose prophetic vision of the “computer as a research and communication instrument” has undeniably become a reality.

 

 

 

On Lewis and Technology 1944

our lives are so (…) involved with the evolution of our machines that we have grown to see and feel everything in [their] terms. (Lemuel in Lilliput, 1944)1

[Lewis’] concern for the order of Western civilization has led him to contemplate the contemporary situation minutely and in its entirety. (Ibid)

In the middle 1940s, McLuhan began to turn his attention to the relation of technology and culture.  This had much to do with his exposure to the work of two major European intellectuals both of whom he met personally in 1943: Sigfried Giedion, who came to St Louis to further his research on its riverfront, and Wyndham Lewis, who was discovered living in Windsor by McLuhan’s mother. McLuhan immediately read everything he could find from both.

Giedion emphasized the growing influence of technology on architecture and all the arts in Space, Time and Architecture (1941, originally lectures at Harvard in 1938) and had begun to publish the research which would eventuate in Mechanization Takes Command (1948).2

McLuhan had read Lewis’ Time and Western Man (1927) in Cambridge.  Now he scrambled to catch up with the rest of his remarkable output. His 1944 ‘Lemuel in Lilliput’ represented the first of his lifelong attempts3 to come to terms with Lewis and began by stipulating:

I propose to consider here only three or four of the thirty-odd volumes of Wyndham Lewis. This means neglecting the fact that he is the only serious painter England has had in the past fifty years, and that he is one of the half-dozen great painters of Europe in the same period. This, perhaps his most important side in the long run, must be put out of the present discussion. Similarly, as the author of Tarr, The Apes of God and The Childermass, he takes his place in the literature of prose satire as a classic. (…) Works of this scope and importance must be reserved for separate treatment, especially since they are little read in America. Instead, something will be said about another side of his work — the pamphleteering. This is the side from which both the novels and the painting of Lewis are most readily approached. 

In the pamphlets, especially The Art of Being Ruled (1926), what particularly attracted McLuhan’s attention was Lewis’ treatment of the affect of technology on culture — aka “the war on the intellect”:

  • we hear on every hand [McLuhan was writing in 1944]: “This isn’t a war, it’s a revolution.” “We live in an age of transition.” “Things will be different after this war.” “This won’t be the last war.” Whether spoken by the responsible or the moronic, these remarks, and countless others like them, have no meaning. They are spoken in a trance of inattention while the reason is in permanent abeyance. They are typical of men who no longer understand the world they have made and which, as robots, they operate day by day. Such is the situation into which Lewis shot his pamphlet breezily entitled ‘The Art of Being Ruled’.
  • To read the “pamphlets” of Lewis is to become aware not only of the scope of the forces arrayed against reason and art, but it is to have anatomized before one’s eyes every segment of the contemporary scene of glamorized commerce and advertising, and, above all, of the bogus science, philosophy, art, and literature which has been the main instrument in producing universal stupefaction.
  • The dehumanization of life [proceeds] by means of centralized methods of “communication”, and by the lethal abstractionizing of the machine (…) The life of free intelligence has never (…) encountered such anonymous and universal hostility.
  • The rulers of modern society are increasingly identified with these technicians who control “scientifically” [via] educational experiment and the Gallup poll: “In reality they are another genus of puppets, a genus of homicidal puppets” [citing ‘The Art of Being Ruled’].
  • Lewis presents a massive documentation and analysis of the art and science and philosophy which manufacture the Zeitgeistthe Zeitgeist being the force which manipulates the puppets who govern [ie, manipulate] us.4
  • the modern state is necessarily an educationalist state owing to the huge impassivity of the urban masses on the one hand and to the closely centralized control of all agencies of communication on the other.

“In a word”, said McLuhan, using a mannerism he had picked up from Bernie Muller-Thym, his close friend and colleague at SLU, “not only was modern society hostile to art, but to life and reason also.”

McLuhan had no ideas yet just how — through what means of transformation — technology and communication were able to affect culture. But he was clear that, in modern times at least, their result was to consolidate into a undifferentiated fog (as in the opening scene of Fellini’s ):

  • the fabric of modern life is woven without a seam.
  • as a thousand different activities mystically coalesce in response to the religion of merging, or mesmeric engulfing (…) the Dagwoods and the billionaire power-gluttons are equally rushing to the suicide of total immersion in the chaos5 of matter (…) the exploited and the exploiter coalesce.
  • Modern man, philosophically committed and conditioned to sensation and its twin, action, is automatically manifesting the fruits of that philosophy in a multitude of ways. Fanatically wedded to matter (…) all his acts will uniformly possess a character of accelerated imbecility.
  • Everything in our life today conspires to thrust most people into prescribed tracks, in what can be called a sort of trance of action. Hurrying, without any significant reason, from spot to spot at the maximum speed obtainable…
  • how is the typical individual of this epoch to do some detached thinking for himself? All his life is disposed with a view to banishing reflection.
  • the rulers of the modern world are not detached or critical. They do not reflect. They do not consider ends. They are wholly immersed in the matter which they utilize without understanding its character.
  • the pathological blindness of the modern world to anything but itself: “It is naturally, for itself, the best that has ever been — it is for it that the earth has laboured for so long (…) “The Heir of all the Ages.”

Ten years later, in ‘Nihilism Exposed’, a 1955 review6 of Wyndham Lewis by Hugh Kenner, McLuhan retained this assessment:

it is precisely the courage of Lewis in pushing the Cartesian and Plotinian angelism to the logical point of the extinction of humanism and personality that gives his work such importance in the new age of technology. For, on the plane of applied science we have fashioned a Plotinian world-culture which implements the non-human and superhuman doctrines of neo-Platonic angelism to the point where the human dimension is obliterated by sensuality at one end of the spectrum, and by sheer abstraction at the other. (…)  And now in the twentieth century when nature has been abolished by art and engineering, when government has become entertainment and entertainment has become the art of government, now the gnostic and neo-Platonist and Buddhist can gloat: “I told you so! This gimcrack mechanism is all that there ever was in the illusion of human existence. Let us rejoin the One“. This pagan unworldliness carried to its ultimate mystical point is what makes the work of Lewis so intense and his evaluation so fearless.

What gave Lewis “such importance in the new age of technology” was his specification of the background structural dynamics through which analysis in the humanities and social sciences had to be made. This was the core of McLuhan’s lifetime work and he had glimpsed it already in this 1944 essay:

Where everything is in question, and where all traditional values are repudiated, the everyday problems have become, necessarily, identical with [problems of] the abstractions from which all [perceptions of] concrete things in the first place come. And the everyday life is too much affected by the speculative activities that are (…) trans-valuing our world for it to be able to survive in ignorance of those speculations…

It is (…) a matter of the utmost concern for us to know from what sources and by what means the rulers of the modern world determine what they will do next.  How do they determine the ends for which, as means, they employ the vast machines of government, education, and amusement? Lewis gives the answer that “art and science are the very material out of which the law is made. They are the suggestion; out of them are cut the beliefs by which men are governed” [citing ‘The Art of Being Ruled’].

Hence, because “art and science are the very material out of which the law is made”:

All question of the artistic value of Joyce and Picasso apart, the man whose sensibility and judgment cannot cope with them easily and naturally, has not the equipment to consider the world he lives in.

Defining “the equipment” of “sensibility and judgment” needed “to consider the world” was McLuhan’s aim. The object was not the world as the complex of physical things, but the world as the redoubled complex of experienced things, the world(s) we live in. Great questions remained, however. What was the means through which technology was able to affect culture? Prior to that, just what was technology, especially if language could be considered the first art and the first technology, one enabling culture (not disabling it as it does at present)? And if “speculative activities” might be thought to be the source “from which all concrete things in the first place come”, how was this different from Lodge’s “Platonist” comparative method where “philosophy is essentially speculative, an affair of alternative possibilities”? Key to this question, in turn, was the further question (as, indeed, Plato had been well aware) of the nature of ‘identity’ where “everyday problems have become, necessarily, identical with the abstractions from which all concrete things in the first place come”? And just what was implicated with this “first place”? What eventuated ‘there’? And when? And, finally, how was communication about all these questions to be initiated such that collective investigation could be made, at last, into them?

McLuhan would gradually begin to probe all these questions. For now he was clear that an important aspect of Lewis’ work lay in the fact that had faced the communication problem and attempted to answer it:

Lewis (…) sets out to create an audience for himself: “A book of this description is not written for an audience that is already there, prepared to receive it, and whose minds it will fit like a glove. There must be a good deal of stretching of the receptacle (…) It must of necessity make its own audience” [citing The Art of Being Ruled].

This “stretching of the receptacle” was conceived by Lewis as enabling, or forcing, the “toil of detachment” (The Art of Being Ruled):

  • As a preparation for intelligent action, Lewis advocates self-extrication from the ideologic machine by an arduous course of detachment…
  • Lewis pleases nobody because he is like an intruder at a feast who quietly explains that dinner must be temporarily abandoned since the food has been poisoned and the guests must be detached from their dinners by means of a stomach pump.
  • the modern man has long lost the use of his eyes. (…) The particular means by which Lewis has extricated himself from the ideologic machine of our epoch (…) is that of the painter’s eye…
  • the lethal abstractionizing of the machine (…) has left only a hole-and-corner existence for the serious artist. No great artist ever fought so furiously to maintain a tiny milieu for art as Lewis has done.

From now on, McLuhan’s work would move along two parallel tracks “in theory and in practice”. On the one hand he would attempt a kind of phenomenology of American life that would culminate in The Mechanical Bride.  In the 1944 Lewis essay he could already adroitly specify:

The destruction of family life, in theory and in practice, the flight from adulthood, the obliteration of masculine and feminine has all gone ahead — by means of a glorification of those things. Never was sex so much glorified, children and motherhood so idolized and advertised in theory as at this present hour when the arrangements for their internment have been completed.

On the other hand, he would attempt to demonstrate how “Catholicity of mind”, attained neither abstractly in transcendent “grace”, nor through “immersing ourselves” in the particularities of world, might offer itself as the only exit from the cul-de-sac of nihilism:

let us not suppose for one instant that Catholicity of mind is conferred by grace or that we are freed from “the world’s slow stain” [Shelley, ‘Adonais’, 1821] by immersing ourselves in the best sellers of yesteryear(…)7 Certainly there can be no Catholic action at the educated level until this equipment [of combined “sensibility and judgment”] is acquired and mastered — a fact which explains why the Catholic mind never has to be seriously considered by the non-Catholic mind in England and America today. This situation can be illustrated by an exception such as [Jacques] Maritain. Maritain is perfectly at home amidst modern art and letters. He has a contemporary sensibility. This in turn has energized and directed his philosophical activity, and given a precise, contemporary relevance to the philosophia perennis. He is therefore a force to be reckoned with by non-Catholic philosophers. He can mesh with the modern mind, such as it is. He can impinge. For the English speaking Catholic who would do likewise but who knows not how to begin (and his formal education will not be of any assistance in this matter), let him pore upon the works of Wyndham Lewis, let him read by day and meditate by night.

 *****

  1. ‘Lemuel in Lilliput’, Key thinkers and Modern Thought (St. Louis University studies in honor of St. Thomas Aquinas), Volume 2, 1944, 58-72; reprinted in The Medium and the Light 178-197. All citations below, including all of the the bullet-points, are taken from this essay (unless otherwise identified).
  2. ‘A Complicated Craft Is Mechanized (Development of the Pin-Tumbler Cylinder Lock by Linus Yale, Jr.)’, The Technology Review, 46(1), 1944, 2–9.
  3. Aside from brief treatments throughout his books and essays, McLuhan wrote the following essays specifically on Lewis: ‘Lemuel in Lilliput’, 1944; ‘Wyndham Lewis: His Theory of Art and Communication’, Shenandoah, 4(2/3), 1953; ‘My Friend, Wyndham Lewis’, The Atlantic MonthlyJune 1969;  ‘The Lewis Vortex: Art and Politics as Masks of Power’, Wyndham Lewis: Letteratura/Pittura, ed Giovanni Cianci, 1982 (written in 1970-1); ‘Lewis’ Prose Style’, in Wyndham Lewis: A Revaluation, ed Jeffrey Meyers, 1980. He also did several interviews on Lewis such as ‘Lewis in St Louis’, a flexidisk recording included in arts/canada, #114, November 1967, and ‘The Global Lewis’ in the Lewisletter, 5:2, 1976. McLuhan reviews of Lewis books included his important ‘Nihilism Exposed(review of Wyndham Lewis by Hugh Kenner) in Renascence 8:2, 1955 and ‘A Critical Discipline’ (review of Wyndham Lewis: A Portrait of the Artist as the Enemy by Geoffrey Wagner) in Renascence 12:2, 1960.
  4. ‘Govern’ = ‘manipulate’: “the rulers of the modern world (…) employ the vast machines of government, education, and amusement”.
  5. In ‘Where Chesterton Comes In’ (1948), the word ‘chaos’ is used over and over again to describe the contemporary situation. See http://mcluhansnewsciences.com/mcluhan/2017/07/mcluhans-realism-9-where-chesterton-comes-in/
  6. Nihilism Exposed‘, Renascence 8:2, 1955.
  7. The sentence omitted here is cited above: “All question of the artistic value of Joyce and Picasso apart, the man whose sensibility and judgment cannot cope with them easily and naturally, has not the equipment to consider the world he lives in.”

The Comparative Method of Rupert Lodge

At the end of 1935, coming up to the last months of his undergraduate career at Cambridge and in search of a teaching job, McLuhan wrote to E.K. Brown, the new chairman of the English Department back at the University of Manitoba. Describing his own experience there from 1929 to 1934, McLuhan wrote that although he majored in English, he had come to direct his major “energies to philosophy, and did [his] best work for Professor [Rupert Clendon] Lodge.” (Dec 12, 1935, Letters 79)1

Lodge took a “comparative” approach to philosophy in which the first task in addressing any problem or issue was to consider how it would appear in three fundamentally different types of experience, “three well-defined channels”.2

Lodge described this method in a programmatic essay published in Manitoba Essays, a volume he edited in 1937 “in commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the University of Manitoba by members of the teaching staffs of the university and its affiliated colleges”. Lodge’s essay, concluding the volume, was called ‘The Comparative Method in Philosophy’:

How many philosophical alternatives are there? Theoretically it looks as though the number of -isms [realism, idealism, etc] might be infinite. (…) The history of such speculation, however, (…) indicates that philosophical theorizings (…) flow in one of three well-defined channels. (…) Realism interprets experience as a kind of being, idealism as a kind of knowing. It is easy to see that, as indicated, both realism and idealism are one-sided. Experience has been split up into two aspects, and then the whole has been interpreted exclusively in terms of one of its aspects. It is all nature, or all mind. The extreme forms of these views have always invited criticism. To interpret the whole in terms of one of its parts, whichever part we take as fundamental, can hardly be sound. Obviously the only sound method is to interpret the whole in terms of the whole. Consequently a third type of philosophy has tended to develop: a philosophy which tries to be true to experience, and to avoid all abstract and one-sided theorizings. This attempt at interpretation has taken many forms. One of the best known is called “pragmatism”.
(…)
Here, then, we have three typical directions in which philosophers move when they attempt to master experience: the realist, the idealist, and the pragmatist direction. In the nature of the case, these directions are divergent. To take one pathway, of itself precludes taking either of the others. If any one pathway is right, then the others are certainly wrong.3 So much is clear. But is any pathway right, and, if so, which? How are we to tell?
(…)
Where the differences express, in the end, not merely divergent temperaments but divergent lives, ways of living whose whole background and outlook are diverse, there is no cheap and easy method of deciding between such schools. Each declares with equal sincerity and regard for truth that its own view is and must be accepted as the best. Judged in the light of experience as a whole, each works well.
(…)
Is there any way in which this method [of following one’s “own view”] could be improved? I think there is one way and one way only: namely, by completely reversing the usual procedure. (…) In studying any problem as philosophers, I suggest that we should approach it (1) from the realist, (2) from the idealist, and (3) from the pragmatist standpoint, so as to view it from all three angles. Not that these views can, by some dialectical hocus-pocus, be combined into a single picture. They cannot. As theoretical alternatives each definitely excludes the other two.
(…)
We conclude that, for theoretical philosophers, a many-sided comparative study is of greater importance than adherence to a single view; and that (…) any single view may well be regarded with suspicion.
(…)
If philosophy is essentially speculative, an affair of alternative possibilities, I must study those alternative possibilities, and must not, in my enthusiasm for realism (or idealism or pragmatism) close my eyes to alternative possibilities. In so far as any one alternative (eg, realism) refuses to be regarded as one alternative amongst others, and claims to be in exclusive possession of the whole truth, I must be sceptical of its claims. In fact, in so far as it ceases to be sceptical about its own claims, and becomes convinced realism (or convinced idealism or convinced pragmatism), it loses its open-mindedness and is really ceasing to be truly speculative and philosophical. ln a word, it is precisely such one-sided philosophizing which is anti-philosophical, and not comparative philosophy, with its scepticism directed against one-sidedness. As the speculative construction of interpretations which essentially admit of alternatives, philosophy is necessarily sceptical of one-sided claims; and its proper method of study is necessarily comparative.

 McLuhan came to criticize this method severely when he was in Cambridge:

Lodge is a decided Platonist and I learned [to think] that way as long as I was trying to interpret Christianity in terms of comparative religion. Having perceived the sterility of that process, I now realize that Aristotle is the soundest basis for Xian doctrine.  (McLuhan to Elsie, Herbert & Maurice  McLuhan, February 1935, Letters 53)

It is all important to consider what McLuhan was criticizing in Lodge here — and also what he was not.4 What McLuhan considered “sterile” in “trying to interpret Christianity in terms of comparative religion” was the stipulation that “for theoretical philosophers, a many-sided comparative study is of greater importance than adherence to a single view” such that “any single view may well be regarded with suspicion” and “and it is quite possible that all (…) are (…) fallacious”. But to regard Christianity suspiciously as merely one cultural option among many, one that could well be “fallacious”, was, of course, exactly not to be Christian and to distance oneself, at a stroke, from a two-thousand year history5 and from (in McLuhan’s case) the faith and social forms of one’s own family for generations stretching back beyond memory.

Put in the terms of Harold Innis, such an option was situated at the extreme ‘space’ end of the time-space spectrum.  Only so could it be oblivious to the violence done to its own roots and to the dangers it might be generating for the future. To be oblivious in these ways was for Innis exactly not to think. Hence the association he proffered between particular time-space assumptions and the “conditions of freedom of thought”.6

Further the “suspicion” exercised by such “comparative study” was itself “a single view” and so fell before the critique made by Lodge himself of all such singularities: “experience has been split up into two aspects [here “the comparative method” and everything else], and then the whole has been interpreted exclusively in terms of one of its aspects.” But by what right did “the comparative method” assume this prerogative?  Lodge’s silence on this issue and on its associated assumption that abstract(ed) thought was higher and more valuable than the particulars considered by it lay behind McLuhan’s charge that he was “a decided Platonist”. Indeed, Lodge himself insisted that “philosophy is essentially speculative, an affair of alternative possibilities”.

Moreover, the “comparative method” was utterly abstract in a series of other ways as well.  It had no way of accounting for the relation between its analysis and the objects it claimed to understand.  Nor did it consider its context in a particular time and space. Nor did it have an explanation for the fact that it and its practitioners were utterly finite and yet seemed capable of true perception — how was this communication possible?

As a result of considerations like these (but also, of course, from many others, especially from his deepening knowledge of modern English authors from Hopkins to Eliot, Pound and Joyce), McLuhan took on the task of trying to formulate a discipline that would evade the problems of Lodge’s “comparative method” — but that would preserve certain features of that method, especially the recourse to “well-defined” types in the analysis of human history and society. This quest would find its first fruit in McLuhan’s PhD thesis almost a decade later (1943) in which the three arts of the trivium would be used both as a subject in the history of Europe for two thousand years (roughly 400 BC to 1600 AD) and as a background “dispute” in the works of Thomas Nashe. The next year McLuhan gave a lecture in St Louis bringing the terms of his thesis into the present: ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’ (published in 1946 and later included in The Interior Landscape). And his whole career thereafter would be dedicated to such questions as: How to define the fundamental structures (plural) at work in individual and social history?  Just how do these structures work, in terms of their genesis, their interactions with one another and their “penetration” of mind and society?  And how might a collective study of these matters be initiated?

All of these questions went back to Lodge’s “comparative method”.

 

 

  1. According to Marchand (p 28), Lodge called McLuhan his “most outstanding” student in a recommendation included in his application to Cambridge. The McLuhan Papers in Ottawa retain correspondence between McLuhan and Lodge from 1944-1945, so the two remained in touch at least until  this time.
  2. This and all citations below, unless otherwise noted, come from Lodge’s ‘The Comparative Method in Philosophy‘, in Manitoba Essays, ed Lodge, 1937, 405-432.
  3. Lodge in this same essay: “As (…) opposed interpretations, systems of thought based upon principles logically incompatible with one another (…) cannot possibly all be true; and it is quite possible that all such alternative -isms are, to an undetermined degree, fallacious.”
  4. The “comparative method” advocated by Lodge (and the somewhat similar procedure of his colleague, Henry Wright) gave McLuhan a series of topics for life-long consideration. Its central contention was that the medium is the message — any issue or problem can be construed (epistemologically? ontologically?) in at least three fundamentally different ways and the first business for thought was to consider the spectrum of those possible ways. Implicated with this contention was the idea that the gap is where the action is since the borders or gaps between such possibilities must be navigable if a “comparative method” in Lodge’s sense were to be possible at all.  So the “comparative method” could be said to be an exercise in making oneself at home in the ‘gaps between’ fundamental possibilities as the only way of considering them in their plurality. These gaps as the means or medium of this comparative consideration would ultimately be the medium that is the message.
  5. A tradition is not the possession of all answers to all problems.  It is a continuing commitment to consider new problems in relation to solutions that have been found to old ones in the past. This sort of commitment is an immediate casualty of the loss of what Innis called “time sense”.
  6. See Innis and “the conditions of freedom of thought”.

McNaspy remembers McLuhan

In his posthumously published memoir, Play On! (1996), Clement J. McNaspy, S.J. (1915-1995), a colleague of McLuhan at St Louis University and a frequent correspondent of his in the 1940s, records “the growth of my friendship with a young professor at St. Louis (…) H. Marshall McLuhan” (39).  The two became acquainted in SLU in 1937 (or 1938?1):

While I was never a member of the English department at St. Louis University, either as student or faculty member, my activity as director of the chorus of scholastics helped me get to know several teachers there. Principal among them at the time was Father [William] McCabe [S.J., the head of the English department]. One day, shortly after he had employed McLuhan, a Canadian recently graduated from Cambridge University in England, Father [McCabe] met me in the hall and mentioned that Marshall McLuhan was interested in getting to know someone interested in music. We met in Father’s office and quickly discovered interests in common. My ignorance of modern English poetry at the time was no less than monumental, since our English teachers at Grand Coteau (Jesuit Novitiate) treated the subject as though it had ended in the early nineteenth century. So, the idea of at last learning something about modern English poetry was thrilling, to say the least. In return, I was happy to introduce Marshall to some of the delights of music and to help deepen his knowledge of Virgil and Dante, both of whom were then and continue to be special enthusiasms of mine. Marshall was astonished to discover that I knew nothing whatsoever about Gerard Manley Hopkins, the great Jesuit poet of the late nineteenth century. We started with several of the “Terrible Sonnets,” which proved a revelation to me. (39)

A further memory of McNaspy recalls the time in the summer of 1938 when McLuhan met Corinne Lewis, whom he would marry a year later. McNaspy conflates their meeting and marriage into “some weeks” (but he was writing almost 60 years after the events):

Shortly before taking my final exams in philosophy and in classics, I recall a very pleasant drive over into Illinois with Marshall McLuhan. We visited several Native American mounds and discussed all manner of personal issues. “Do you plan to get married?” I asked. “I don’t think so,” replied Marshall.”I plan to be wedded to my work.” A few months later when I was at Spring Hill College, I recall receiving a letter from Marshall announcing, “I’ve just met a marvelous person named Corinne. She is large and has masses of hair and is from Dallas.” I saw the handwriting [on the wall], and my thoughts were confirmed some weeks later when another letter announced, “Just married Corinne. We’re very happy!” From then on I looked forward to meeting the marvelous Corinne. (42)

  1. McNaspy says that this meeting took place “shortly after (William McCabe, head of the English department) had employed McLuhan” and that McLuhan was “a Canadian recently graduated from Cambridge University in England”. Both of these point to 1937, McLuhan’s first year at SLU, rather than 1938. But in 1938 Bernard Muller-Thym returned to SLU from Toronto and began to write a column on ‘Music’ in the SLU magazine, Fleur de Lis. McLuhan and Muller-Thym rapidly became best friends. It may be that McLuhan’s sudden interest in music relates to this 1938 event rather than to 1937.

McLuhan’s realism 9: Where Chesterton Comes In

‘Where Chesterton Comes In’,1 McLuhan’s 1948 introduction to Hugh Kenner’s Paradox in Chesterton, presented him with an opportunity to update the evaluation he had made in his first published paper in 1936:  ‘G. K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic’.

The new Chesterton piece took up where the previous one concluded: “the meaning and effect of Mr. Chesterton”, he had said then, lay in his “tireless vigilance in examining current fashion and fatalism”. Similarly, more than a decade later, but with “fashion and fatalism” now advanced to “chaos” after the intervening WW2:

The specific contemporary relevance of Chesterton is this, that his metaphysical intuition of being was always in the service of the search for moral and political order in the current chaos.

He (…) directed his intellectual gaze not to the schoolmen [of the middle ages] but to the heart of the chaos of our time.

That is where Chesterton comes in. His unfailing sense of relevance and of the location of the heart of the contemporary chaos carried him at all times to attack the problem of morals and psychology (…) the most confused issues of our age.

But McLuhan’s interest extended now to the question of how this chaos in psychology and in the moral and political order had come about. His broached this answer:

By the early seventeenth century Descartes could rally enthusiastic support for the proposition that since no philosopher had ever been convinced by the dialectical or metaphysical proofs of other philosophers for the truth of anything, therefore the time had come to introduce a kind of proof which which all men could accept — namely, mathematical proof. What Descartes really did was to make explicit the fact which had been prepared by centuries of decadent scholastic rationalism: the fact that a complete divorce had been achieved between abstract intellectual and specifically psychological order.  Henceforth men would seek intellectually only for the kind of order they could readily achieve by rationalistic means: a mathematical and mechanistic order which precludes [application to or even the idea of] a human and psychological order.2

As a result of this “rationalistic” turn, McLuhan conceded, “a high degree of abstract mechanical order has been achieved” and “great discoveries (…) made”. At the same time, however:

human moral, psychological, and political chaos has steadily developed, with its concurrent crop of fear and anger and hate. The rational efforts of men have been wholly diverted from the ordering of appetite and emotion, so that any effort to introduce or to discover order in man’s psychological life has been left entirely to the artist.

In England, even most artists, including “the Toby-jug Chesterton of a particular literary epoch”, had participated in this drift away from the desperate need to establish “order in man’s psychological  life”. There had been “an evasion of that world of adult horror into which [European artists like] Baudelaire gazed with intense suffering and humility”.

It was the distinction of Wyndham Lewis (as McLuhan had already begun to specify in his 1944 essay ‘Lemuel in Lilliput’) that he had seen this horror early on and had been probing its forms and causes for four decades already — mostly in an uncomprehending obscurity.3 

But again: how had this state of society and of the individual soul come about with such catastrophic consequence? How had an entire civilization become so enamoured with a certain kind of fateful certainty that it was willing, even eager, to destroy itself for it? What could account for the mass transformation of human beings into suicidal lemmings and murderous monsters?

McLuhan did not have an answer to this question which might be stated in so many words — an ambition that would in any case be self-contradictory since reflecting the very “abstract mechanical order” that demanded investigation and not merely, as would be represented by such a facile answer, the further replication of itself.  But what he did have was the recommendation made at the end of his ‘Ancient Quarrel’ essay from 1946 (originally a talk from 1944) and even initiated to some extent in his 1943 Nashe thesis (written in 1941 and 1942): “knowledge of the history of the present dispute would serve to diminish the fog and the passions aroused at present, and would substitute some light for much heat”. If, this was to say, “the kind of order [we humans] could readily achieve by rationalistic means” but “which precludes a human and psychological order”, if this kind of “mechanistic” order is not the only option for our thought and action, what other options for rival orders are open to us such that they might be said to be in a “dispute” or “quarrel” with it?

At this point in 1948 there were many aspects of this question McLuhan had yet to consider: when does this “dispute” take place if it is always ongoing between these perennial options for order?  if this “present ” time is not the same time as that of “the [chronological] history of the (…) dispute”, what is the relation of these times?  how do media relate to these times, both as deriving from them (like everything human) and as fostering this or that (necessarily temporary) advantage of one option over the others? and how do perception and art relate to this “dispute” of options and of times, both as a matter of the genesis of perception and art, and of their potential contributions to investigations in this new field (or fields)?

All these questions lay in the future.  But what McLuhan could already see clearly, and was able to specify here in his second Chesterton essay, was that a potential solution to “the chaos of our time” lay in a realist position that yet recognized “every kind of reasonableness” in its inevitable multiplicity.  A peculiar kind of idealistic realism was envisioned:

Catholics have failed to understand or utilize Vico. Vico’s great discovery of a psychological method for interpreting historical periods and cultural patterns is rooted in his perception that the condition of man is never the same but his nature is unchanging. (…) Vico was not a Thomist, and so he has been abandoned to the sceptics; but he invented an instrument of historical and cultural analysis of the utmost use for the discovery of psychological and moral unity in the practical order.

McLuhan’s realism was focused on moral and political order as against a merely intellectual order. He rejected out of hand the sort of response to “the present chaos” that he had found in Catholic universities like SLU and Assumption and now again at St Michael’s at UT:

The Catholic teaching of philosophy and the arts tends to be catechetical. It seeks precisely that Cartesian pseudo-certitude which it officially deplores, and divorces itself from the complex life of philosophy and the arts. This is only to say that the Catholic colleges are just like non-Catholic colleges.

But he yet saw the foundation of moral and political order as lying in a “psychological method” that was able to investigate the varying conditions of humans (which are “never the same”) within a unified theory. Central to this idea was that our “connatural” realistic access to the world is not restricted to things in the exterior landscape, but includes as well the full panorama of “the interior landscape”. This sort of ‘interior realism’ was the key to McLuhan’s whole contribution because no one then or now would deny the potential value of the scientific study of human options — if only such study were possible! But the whole world has staked literally everything on the certainty of its impossibility!

In McLuhan’s analysis, we continue to “seek intellectually only for the kind of order [we] could readily achieve by rationalistic means: a mathematical and mechanistic order which precludes [application to or even the idea of] a human and psychological order”. A certain kind of certainty dominates us and the only way out of the cul de sac is to recognize the existing “dispute” or “quarrel” concerning such certainty in “the interior landscape” — and then to investigate it as we do all things in the exterior one. Only this could provide, once more, “a human and psychological order”.

The basis of McLuhan’s idea was that this sort of research is not only not impossible, but that it is so possible (so to speak) that it is actually always taking place already — or always has taken place already — in our every perception.  Even perception, “the first stage of apprehension”4  takes place only insofar as the interior “dispute” has been witnessed and decided in favor of one of its possibilities. The great need is therefore for us to remember or to “retrace” (as McLuhan usually has it) what we are already witnessing and deciding in this way at every moment, but somehow leave in utter obscurity.  And how is this? The reason seems to be that it takes place in the interior landscape, not the external one, and our natural realistic access to things is not believed to extend to the former as it does to the latter. We are only exterior realists.

McLuhan saw comparable potential to Vico’s “psychological method for interpreting historical periods and cultural patterns” in

Chesterton’s powerful intrusion into every kind of confused moral and psychological issue of our time. For he seems never to have reached any position by dialectic or doctrine, but to have enjoyed a kind of connaturality with every kind of reasonableness.

Here was McLuhan’s ‘interior realism’ in a nutshell.  He was fundamentally against “reach[ing] any position by dialectic or doctrine”. A “catechetical” understanding of life was of no interest to him whatsoever. For this would implicate an “evasion” of the communication we always already have with the world around us and within us “connaturally”. A kind of “rationalistic” detour would be taken in an attempt to get where we already are.5 Decisively, however, that world to which we have such natural access included for McLuhan different kinds of understanding (aka, different kinds of “reasonableness”) in different people (especially considered over widely separated times and spaces), as well as the different options for our own understanding, all of which are always in “dispute” in each one of us in every moment. (It is the resources of the latter interior panoply, of course, that offers potential understanding of the former anthropological one.)

It was in this context that McLuhan staked his claim to be a true Thomist:

whereas St. Thomas was a great abstract synthesizer facing a unified psychological world, the modern Thomist has an abstract synthesis of human knowledge with which to face a psychological chaos. Who then is the true Thomist? The man who contemplates an already achieved intellectual synthesis, or the man who, sustained by that synthesis, plunges into the heart of the chaos?

 

  1. All citations below, unless otherwise noted, come from ‘Where Chesterton Comes In’, McLuhan’s introduction to Hugh Kenner, Paradox in Chesterton, 1948. Kenner’s book was developed out of his M.A. thesis at UT, for which his adviser was Fr Gerald Phelan — McLuhan’s friend and spiritual counsel.
  2. McLuhan probably took this reading of Descartes from Etienne Gilson.  In his essay, ‘The Future of Augustinian Metaphysics’, in A Monument to Augustine (1930), Gilson writes: “Descartes is essentially a man who attempted and carried through an experiment on the following notion: What happens to metaphysics, if we apply to it the mathematical method? In our opinion, what happens to it is that you destroy it. Descartes did not hold that view; on the contrary, he believed himself to be the first to save it (…) But as soon as he universalizes his method and decides to apply it to the totality of reality, Descartes entangles himself in singular difficulties. To start with, he wagers, without a shadow of possible justification, that there is nothing (…) that escapes mathematical method; then, bound to model reality on his ideas, instead of modeling his ideas on reality, he is driven to recover things only through concepts and to have no other starting point but thought.” The translation here of ‘things’, doubtless for ‘les choses’, is too literal.  What Gilson had in mind “that escapes mathematical method” was exactly not bare ‘things’ but, as McLuhan put it, things of the “human and psychological order”.
  3. The obscurity in which Lewis had long worked despite the outpouring of his energy in multiple media was perfectly symbolized by his exile in Toronto during WW2. And if Toronto was already obscurity, what was Lewis’ obscurity within Toronto? Kenner in a letter (March 18, 1987) to Philip Marchand: “He (McLuhan) kept mentioning Wyndham Lewis, whom I’d never heard of, notwithstanding that for two years (in Toronto) I’d lived half a mile away from him.”
  4. McLuhan to Pound, July 24, 1951, Letters 228.
  5. “For first principles are not sought, since they are present and to hand; and if what is present is sought for, it becomes hidden and lost.” (al Ghazali, Deliverance from Error, ca 1108, §ii)

McLuhan’s realism 8: Chesterton as practical mystic

The first lines of McLuhan’s first published academic article, ‘G. K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic’ (1936), are extraordinary.  For they name in Chesterton, and anticipate in McLuhan’s own career over the next 45 years, their common response to the fact that “there are two principal sides to everything”:

When it is seen that there are two principal sides to everything, a practical and a mystical, (…) the meaning and effect of Mr. Chesterton can become clear (…) That tireless vigilance in examining current fashion and fatalism, which has characterized him for more than thirty years, clearly depends upon his loyalty to a great vision: “His creed of wonder was Christian by this absolute test, that he felt it continually slipping from himself as much as from others.”1

What is at stake in these sentences is the fact that we humans are directly and to some extent infallibly related to the real world around us — but the detailed understanding and significance of our experience can and, in fact usually, eludes us. We know truly, but always partially. Therefore the demand that we continually revision and reconsider — that is, learn — based on our real perception of the real, but going on from what we understand of it to probe it more deeply and more comprehensively (and sometimes revolutionarily).

Almost 40 years later, in conversation with an old University of Manitoba classmate from the early 1930s, Kaye Rowe, McLuhan would observe: “You must remember that I began as an engineer [and then] switched to philosophy and English. Structural operations were always at the core of my pursuit whether in philosophy, modern poetry or in [the analysis of] management…” (Intimate look at Marshall McLuhan). “Structural operations were always at the core of [his] pursuit” exactly because “there are two principal sides to everything” and this challenges Christians, indeed those with “loyalty to a great vision” of whatever sort, or, in fact, those who would actually think at all, continually to reassess how the sides of the oppositions they encounter relate to one another. (Precisely therefore, as the beginning of Take Today has it, “the meaning of meaning is relationship.”)

There can be no respite from such oppositional encounters (inside us, outside us and between our inside and outside) exactly because “sides” are engendered in principle.  And the response to this perpetual dynamic must be “tireless” exactly because the desire to rest content with some ‘one-sided’ determination, ignoring or suppressing the omnipresent (in principle!) other side, constitutes the secret heart of nihilism. In his 1955 ‘Nihilism Exposed’ McLuhan gave voice to this temptation as “Let us rejoin the One“. This is Prufrock’s need for an “overwhelming question” that would reduce the plural oppositions we everywhere experience to some forced singularity.

McLuhan cites a part of Chesterton’s description of Hilaire Belloc as applying to Chesterton himself. He could well have cited the full passage:

It was no small part of the irony in the man that different things strove against each other in him; and these not merely in the common human sense of good against evil, but one good thing against another. The unique attitude (…) was summed up in him supremely in this; that he did and does humanly and heartily love the contemporary world, not as a duty but as a pleasure and almost an indulgence; but that he hated as heartily what the contemporary world seemed trying to become. Out of this appeared in his poetry a sort of fierce doubt or double-mindedness which cannot exist in vague and homogeneous observers; something that occasionally amounted to a mixture of loving and loathing.2

As cited above from the start of his essay, McLuhan emphasized Chesterton’s “tireless vigilance in examining current fashion and fatalism”. And he, too, would perplex and irritate his commentators by continually reverting to the all too obvious facts of everyday life — facts that, in their view, either required no explanation or had long ago received all they required of it. In fact, this sort of reversion to “the face of reality” is exactly what McLuhan’s Chesterton essay celebrates and prescribes!

Mr. Chesterton himself is full of that child-like surprise and enjoyment which a sophisticated age supposes to be able to exist only in children. And it is to this more than ordinary awareness and freshness of perception that we may attribute his extraordinarily strong sense of fact. (…) This profound humility in the face of reality is the very condition of honest art and all philosophy (…) most of all does his strong sense of fact account for the recurrence of seeming paradoxes in his writings (…) The most ordinary things become eerily and portentously real. Bodily gestures are stiff with spiritual significance, as in the old pageantry. And the deeps of the subconscious are entered, and monstrous facts from the borderland of the brain impress themselves upon us. As the modern jargon puts it, Mr. Chesterton has achieved an objective correlative for his thought and feeling.

Throughout the emphasis is on the “child-like surprise” and “wonder” of “honest” encounter with the ever-changing “face of reality”.  Humans have their acknowledged or unacknowledged home in this “borderland” between the old and the new.

The only way to maintain “loyalty to a great vision” in this situation is “tireless vigilance in examining current fashion”.  Respect for such a vision demands that nothing be held away from it no matter what “paradoxes” may seem to ensue. It is because modern humans have given up such “vigilance” that they have no “great vision”. But we excuse our infidelities with the opposite idiocy that we lack any “great vision” and therefore have no call to practice “vigilance” of it.

Nietzsche:  Irrtum der Verwechslung von Ursache und Folge. – Es gibt keinen gefährlicheren Irrtum, als die Folge mit der Ursache zu verwechseln: ich heiße ihn die eigentliche Verderbnis der Vernunft. (Götzen-Dämmerung, ‘Die vier großen Irrtümer’)3

  1. These are the first two sentences of ‘G. K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic’ citing Chesterton’s 1912 Manalive. All citations below unless otherwise noted are from McLuhan’s Chesterton essay which first appeared in The Dalhousie Review for January 1936.
  2. “The contemporary world” has been substituted twice in this passage for “England” and “observers” once for “Englishmen”.  McLuhan cites only the portion of it that runs, “a sort of fierce doubt or double-mindedness which cannot exist in vague and homogeneous Englishmen”. The description is from Chesterton’s introduction to Hilaire Belloc: the man and his work, by Creighton Mandell & Edward Shanks, 1916.
  3. Twilight of the Idols, ‘The four great Errors’, 1888. Kaufmann translates: “The error of confusing cause and effect. There is no more insidious error than mistaking the effect for the cause: I call it the real corruption of reason.”

Encountering Poe

In the summer of 1932 (when McLuhan turned 21) he and Tom Easterbrook worked their way across the Atlantic on a cattle boat.1 In a letter written on the boat McLuhan described his first encounter with Poe:

The little blue books [Oxford World Classics] have been doing the rounds of the cabin [of the boat]. I have read only one of them — Poe’s Tales. I find them amusing, interesting curiosities, anything but exciting or absorbing. It must be remembered [however] that he practically created the short story and the detective story at one stroke. (McLuhan to Elsie, Herbert & Maurice McLuhan, June 17-18, 1932, Letters 13-14)

  1. “We get up at 4.30 A.M. water all the cattle by pail then haul up 20 or so bales of hay from the hold, then 20 or 30 sacks of feed. After which we feed the hay then go up and wait for breakfast which comes along at 7. We are divided up into groups of 3 and each have 1/4 of the cattle to feed. After breakfast (8 AM) we clean up all the alley ways and troughs then bed the cattle, then give them each a pail of oats. This takes till 9.30 Then we are finished until 2 PM. At 2 we water and feed and then are free for the day.” (McLuhan to Elsie, Herbert & Maurice McLuhan, June 17-18, 1932, Letters 12)

Remembering Edmonton very vividly

In a letter from April 30, 1970, to Maisie Hewlett (1887-1974), McLuhan recalled his family’s time in Alberta:

I am really grateful to Elizabeth (Trott) Cera for suggesting that you send your quite memorable memoir1 to me. The scenes and the events coincide with the life of my parents in the West before [World] War I. After homesteading [in Mannville, Alberta, 100 miles east of Edmonton,] they went to Edmonton [early in 1911]. My father was in a real estate firm until he joined the army in 1914. I left Edmonton [for Winnipeg] when I was four [in 1915], but remember much of it very vividly. (Letters 405)

Here is a picture of McLuhan with his parents in 1911, age six months, taking in the Edmonton scene that he will long recollect vividly:

  1. A Too Short Yesterday (1970). One of Kaye Rowe’s ‘People Watching’ columns in the Brandon Sun (May 28, 1970, p 12shows that her friend Elizabeth (Trott) Cera must have suggested to Hewlett that a copy go to Rowe as well as to McLuhan: “Cannington Manor, a magnet for legends on the Prairies, has housed since its beginning in the 1880s, assorted people with a touch of epic. The current official recorder is a bright-eyed lady who remains in proper Victorian fashion behind a trio of initials — A.E.M. Hewlett — author of a spritely sequence of 14 years of farming on the acres originally turned by the Cannington Manor squires and 14 years of farm-wife life under its leaking Mansard roof. The title of A Too Short Yesterday (published by The Western Producer Press at Saskatoon) is abstracted from a slender poem in which the lines occur: “Lord, I am too little for a grand eternity. I would hear children’s voices, a spoon beating upon a table; mine I would the way I travelled, loved and lost in a too short yesterday.” One day a few years ago when widowed and her sons grown tall, and with families of their own, she went back the few miles from Carlyle Sask., where she chooses to live in summer, to the Manor and up to the attic. Despite the fact that the house had been used for grain-storage for years, the attic and its contents had remained undisturbed. She found the old wooden trunk, metal-bound, painted and initialled, that she had purchased for 10 shillings in Charing Cross Road in 1911. It had carried her clothing and books when, under the aegis of the British Women’s Emigration Society, she decided to teach in Canada. “You will regret it!” the headmaster of the Yorkshire school where she had taught for three years had warned. Nonsense! The English girl met the incredible challenges of semi-pioneering life, eventually wrote a column for 20 years for The Saskatchewan Farmer under the title, ‘Down On The Farm’. She became, in effect, the (Manitoba journalist) Amy Roe of her province. The only child of a chemist’s widow, leaving mother was the major wrench. But each week she wrote faithfully; the letters were lovingly saved, bundled as to dates and years. Decades later when her mother died the letters were returned with other effects she requested. Every page of the letters is a mirror of the ups and downs of one family in a life difficult to be imagined by her grandchildren. For them — 12 in all plus one great-grandchild — she recaptures the everyday living on a prairie farm, admittedly, no ordinary farm. Earlier assignments by the University of Saskatchewan to Mrs. Hewlett involved (recording) tales based on information collected from over 50 of the early participants of Cannington Manor’s exotic settlement. It began in 1882 with Capt. Edward Mitchell Pierce and associates, a group of upper middle-class English who resolved to re-establish in Saskatchewan’s broad acres the same kind of life they had lived in England. They bred horses, rode to hounds, dressed for dinner on festive occasions and imported younger sons of friends and associates as “apprentices to agriculture” to learn farming from the ground up. Their experiment dwindled and died under the impact of the First World War when the members scattered and Mrs. Hewlett and her husband (designated as “Richard Land”), a ship-board acquaintance but one of the 1890 Cannington inhabitants, took up residence in the manor house. The letters give the record a lively sense of immediacy whether the excitement of the day is the arrival of her wedding gown or a listing of the callers and impromptu dinner guests (anyone passing by, from “Mountie” to horse- trader). Mrs. Hewlett writes with verve and color, the same qualities she manages to impart to her water colors. As a practising artist at 83 she continues to merit one-man shows in the province of her adoption. Her water colors have also hung in the art gallery at Laguna Beach, the artists’ colony resort where she spends several months every winter. Last year when friend Mrs. Duncan Campbell called on the author-painter at the Seas Motel, she discovered the lady clothes-pegging her morning’s sketches on the line to dry. The book bursts with the vitality of elements familiar to our region, with horses and crops and financial worries, with children growing and neighborliness and the hum of cream separator, sewing machine or reaper. She splashes on the colors of skies and spring burgeoning and mauve shadowings on sculptured snow. It makes fascinating reading, a too-short 161 pages in recall of A Too Short Yesterday.”

Kaye Rowe’s “Intimate look at Marshall McLuhan”

Kaye Moreland (1910-1995) was an English department classmate of Marshall McLuhan at the University of Manitoba.  She relocated to Brandon with her husband G R Rowe and began a career in Journalism as Kaye Rowe with the Winnipeg Free Press and (especially) the Brandon Sun. Her 1974 portrait of Marshall McLuhan is online and supplies interesting details of his life in Winnipeg, Cambridge, St Louis and Toronto. The fact that he took part in an unofficial Monday night seminar in Winnipeg in the early 1930s, long before his famous Monday night seminar in Toronto (also unofficial), is a further indication of his enduring attachment to his early two decades in the Manitoba capital.

Rowe’s style is wonderfully western Canadian, both depreciating and sharp: “The Grand Guru of our culture, at once its couch and its analyst…”


An intimate look at Marshall McLuhan by Kaye Rowe1

Brandon Sun – February 02, 1974 – Page 3

Most controversial intellect of the century stamped Made-in-Canada

The Grand Guru of our culture, at once its couch and its analyst

TORONTO: The name — McLuhan — threw its own meteor into the English language; a “McLuhanism” for the book-and-thought diggers carries a reference as specific as does the word, “Kafkaesque.” An aeon or two ago we shared a small honors English seminar with Marshall McLuhan. The course spanned a survey of the Giants of World Literature beginning with the Greek tragedies and moving through the Norse legends, the two Fausts, Don Quixote and other mighty tomes. Five of us decided to trample more wine from the rich grapes with preparation prior to each lecture. We met every Monday evening at Stewart Robb’s2 father’s apartment. The quartet consisted of Eileen Hemphill, who married Dr. Joe Downey of Brandon; Judith Evelyn, who became a Broadway star; Stewart Robb, an academic and the world’s leading authority on Nostradamus; your Brandon Sun writer; and the man who keeps throwing grit into the gears of commercialism — Marshall McLuhan.

Unofficially the Thinker-in-Residence of the University of Toronto, his bailiwick is the Centre for Culture and Technology on campus. Located some 50 yards back of a Queen’s Park Crescent mansion, the stone building is a converted coach-house. The main room holds in semi-circular arrangements a class of 18 evening students, mainly young people on post-graduate courses. Eager and quick, they hang on his utterances, laugh at his witticisms on the last word of a line, knowing the shape of an idea a second before the last word is thrust into place. Spare-framed, six-foot-one, the face is creased in the ruts of a million thought-routes a year. He talks easily, relaxed in his play with ideas and concepts, with words and allusions that rove across the globe, push through the thickets of the centuries. Ten minutes of McLuhan sets the synapses crackling. Everyone sits alertly, no slump, no yawns! He rises and pulls a drawstring on a curtained area. The action reveals a wall painting six feet by five feet. In cool neutrals the busy teaser reveals masses of snarled pipes, gesticulating humanoids and a rectangular central frame. (The painting is by René Cera, originally of Provence, France, a dead-ringer for Picasso at 65; almond-eyed, skin like tight parchment over a well-shaped head, almost Yul Brynner dome-shine. The artist is the husband of our friend Elizabeth Hay3originally of Virden.) “René Cera calls it, Pied Pipers All4,” Dr. McLuhan says. “It’s the boob-tube as the trap for our children. Exposure to its allure for 10 years saps the mental pith. Children are easily influenced. I’m reminded of the Children’s Crusade . . . the first activists’ group! Thousands of them decided they wanted to do their part in winning back the Holy Land from the Infidel. They marched across Europe, became an instant legend. They were pounced upon by the Moslems, sold into slavery, never heard of again.”

Before the class breaks at 10:10 p.m. he takes care to introduce his guests. We lift the dropped jaw back into place as he announces, “She’s a journalist and a speed skater … I remember chasing her around the rink at United College . . .she was wearing a green tam and a green scarf. . . .” All these years Marshall McLuhan has a memory picture with the wrong name attached. We never skated on the United rink; never owned a green tam. It was Katie Taplitsky he was chasing and never caught. But that’s an old story with many memories! We remain silent. He will never know the mixed identities.

An invitation is extended to come upstairs to his office for something warm. The office is triple locked. Souvenir hunters, he discovered, had begun to denude the premises. It is his son Eric who unlocks the door, attends to the tea kettle, clears chairs of books. At 31 Eric, former college lecturer, competent actor, is father’s right-hand man. He serves as chauffeur, looks after the audiovisual materials for lectures and discussion groups, splices, cleans and supervises screenings. Clear-eyed, efficient, his dedication to his father’s work and purposes is a rare and impressive servitude. We wrap chilled hands around the warm cup. Despite the carpeted floors, the old coach-house is full of mean drafts on an early January night. Eric announces a new taping that father might like to hear, an opera with words and music by Ezra Pound done in Gregorian chant technique, the words in French. Reverential listening for 10 minutes until Marshall McLuhan notices that the moon is full. “Do you realize that all human activity doubles at full moon time! More crime, more hospital emergencies, more creativity! I’ve always been pleased that I’m a moon child, [born] on the cusp of July 21, between Leo and Cancer. . . .”

He takes a pill vial from his coat pocket, uncaps and proffers it. “Snuff!” he says. “They tell me it tends to ward off colds. . . .” He uses the 18th century technique for a pinch of snuff, begins to talk about the influences on McLuhan. “My first influence was Jacques Maritain, contemporary French philosopher. At Cambridge I discovered the mysticism and the structuralism of the Jacobeans. John Donne, ‘No man is an island.’ I did my doctorate on Thomas Nashe who traced the dialectic method — this is structure, too — back to 5th century Athens, then on to the rhetorical-historical aspects of the Renaissance. All of which led me to James Joyce, prime example of a structuralist. . . . When I came to Toronto, my great influence was Harold Innis. The economists revered his research into the staples of the Canadian economy: his history of the fur trade, cod fishing, the CPR, pulp and paper. But I was the first to pursue Innis’ communication studies through pulp and paper which led directly to the newspaper as communication. . . . Innis’ focus on forms of communication and their effects on people began with clay tablets and papyrus, the effect of the medium in delivering the message. I used his approach: the effects of media on people. . . .”

St. Louis, Mo., his second university experience after graduation (the first was Madison and the U. of Wisconsin, Dr. Lloyd Wheeler’s alma mater)5 that brought him into contact with several intellectuals whose impact had lasting effect on McLuhan’s thinking. He named Sigfried Giedion and Bernard Muller-Thym. The latter was a lecturer in philosophy and latterly in management. A violinist and a symphony conductor, Muller-Thym turned McLuhan’s mind to the structural aspects of management. The Missouri years also brought close association with two creative people: T.S. Eliot, who drew him into the structuralism of modern poetry, and Percy Wyndham Lewis, artist and war-time Toronto refugee. At McLuhan’s invitation, the Wyndham [and Froanna] Lewis couple found more congenial reception [in St Louis] than parochial Toronto and its disinterest in an original artist who happened to be a stranger. “You must remember that I began as an engineer, switched to philosophy and English. Structural operations were always at the core of my pursuit whether in philosophy, modern poetry or in management. . . .”

A shining brass plaque sits topside of a filing cabinet, safe in its massiveness from the light-fingered souvenir-hunter. Freshly-etched as of November, 1973, is the legend of preservation: “The United States and Canadian Education Association’s award to Marshall McLuhan for his exceptional contribution to communication.”

  1. Rowe’s spelling of many of the names in her report has been silently corrected.
  2. Robb became an IODE scholar in England like McLuhan, but at Oxford, not Cambridge. In his McLuhan bio, Escape into Understanding, Gordon notes that “McLuhan remained in Cambridge until the end of June 1935, meeting then with his Winnipeg friend Stewart Robb, a student at Oxford, and sailing (with him) from Harwich for Belgium” (58). For details see Stewart Robb.
  3. In her column for the Brandon Sun, ‘People Watching’, for April 3, 1976 (p 12), Rowe wrote of Elizabeth Hay (Betty Trott / Liz Cera):
    New name Liz Cera blinked as in neon lights from the masthead of Maclean’s magazine when the year was a babe. Editor of Crafts, Elizabeth Hay Cera was born and grew to her university age at Virden, Man. where father was town clerk. Her sister, the late Lillian Hay, despite the semi-invalidism occasioned by a drug-prescription error, was the most brilliant of book reviewers in the history of the Winnipeg Free Press. During Liz Trott’s (first marriage name) Toronto years, she taught English and art in assorted high schools and raced the pavements doing stories for a financial magazine. Married to art display director, René Cera, of Eaton’s Toronto for the past decade, they had retired to his Lenox, Mass. home in the heart of the Tanglewood-Birkshires country. Every Toronto social occasion of recent years when Liz Cera appeared, she carried a tote containing knitting, crocheting, macrame-knotting. Her page in Maclean’s, by curious coincidence, contains directions for fancy knitting, crocheting and macrame-knots. From around the world, Liz Cera has sent her spontaneous combustion poems written in the contemporary idiom with apologies to Japanese Haiku. One that grows wistful over her Prairie beginnings is:
    FLAT VERSE curious how i had forgotten this need for the full bowl of the sky
  4. Strangely, it emerges from a letter McLuhan wrote his mother on January 22, 1952 (Letters 230) that Kaye Rowe’s friend, Elizabeth Hay (Betty Trott) was the person who introduced him to René Cera long before she and Cera were married in 1966: “Cera just left. (…) Betty Trott, his friend who introduced us, came to supper. She has just left too. The children love her. So does Corinne.”
  5. Rowe and McLuhan knew Wheeler from the UM English department.  In 1936 it was Wheeler who helped McLuhan get his first job at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. See his memory of Wheeler in Speaking of Winnipeg.

McLuhan’s realism 7: “training in moral sensibility”

As discussed in McLuhan’s realism 6: dialectics and erudition not enough, at Christmas 1945 McLuhan wrote to his Jesuit friend from their SLU days, Clement McNaspy, as follows:

Hutchins and Adler have part of the solution. But they are emotional illiterates. Dialectics and erudition are needed, but, without the sharp focusing of training in moral sensibility, futile. (Letters 180)

By “moral sensibility” McLuhan had in mind the myriad practical matters undertaken aside from academic “erudition”. He had long been clear that learning takes place, and is expressed, mostly beyond the “schoolroom”. As he already specified as a 22 year-old back in Winnipeg:

It is, of course, mistaken to suppose that education in any important sense is connected with the schoolroom. Education is the sum total of all those ideas and objects pressing in on the mind every hour of the waking day. (‘Public School Education’, The Manitoban, Oct 17,1933)

But just because he was talking with McNaspy about life beyond “dialectics and erudition” did not mean that he was not also making a series of points in principle.  These were:

  • dialectic has no right to consider itself as the sole first principle of things — just as little as does the ‘rhetorical’ or prudential consideration of momentary practicality
  • dialectic alone, indeed also rhetoric alone, is therefore “futile”: both together are implicated in all aspects of life
  • a third principle must thus be observed, namely that of the plurality and communal integrity of first principles
  • such a third principle of both together would contradict itself, however, if it strove to be singular and alone
  • it is essential to this third principle, therefore, to be at peace with rival principles that, in their striving to be singular and alone, desire only its destruction
  • this fundamental in-equality is what Jackson Knight termed “the main question” and McLuhan called by a great number of names like ‘grammar’, ‘complementarity’, ‘allatonceness’, ‘uttering/outering’, and so on
  • its most important name, however, was ‘communication’ since it is the unaccountable harmony of what is unequal that characterizes language (and all other media) as the made relation of sound (or other material) and meaning
  • such fundamental communication of the unequal is what enables the relation of human beings to God and the development of all the arts and sciences that humans invent on its basis
  • and it is this medium (of communication of the unequal) that above all else is the message

These points went back to McLuhan’s Nashe thesis which traced the history of the three disciplines of the trivium from pre-socratic Greece to 1600 (a good title of the thesis might have been ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Elizabethan England’).  The thesis, in turn, went back to McLuhan’s work at the University of Manitoba with Henry Wright and Rupert Lodge, both of whom in neo-Hegelian manner saw the working of three alternate first principles at work behind or below all human thought, action and experience. Two millennia before that, Plato had envisioned such a knotted ontology of three principles in the gigantomachia of the Sophist. And two millennia even before that, the Egyptians had contemplated such a complex interaction of first principles in the contendings and reconciliations of Horus and Seth.1

The fundamental factor at stake is God’s lack of jealousy.  Hegel (for whom McLuhan’s Meredith M.A. thesis shows an exceptional feel)2 put the crux of the matter as follows:

Plato and Aristotle teach that God is not jealous and does not withhold from human beings knowledge of God’s self and of the truth. What would it be but jealousy for God to deny to consciousness the knowledge of God? In so doing God would have denied to consciousness all truth, for God alone is the truth. Whatever else would be true and might seem somehow to exist in no connection to the divine, is only true to the extent that it is grounded in God and known from God; in other respects it is a disappearing [zeitliche] appearance. The cognition of God and of truth is the only thing that raises human beings above animals, that distinguishes them and makes them happy, or far rather, according to Plato and Aristotle as much as Christian doctrine, blessed. (‘Foreword’ to F.W. Hinrich, Religion in its Inner Relation to Science, 1822])3

McLuhan saw very early, in his early twenties, that the third principle of the harmony of rival first principles had gradually gone into eclipse over the last half millennium or so until it came to be generally believed either that truth existed only in singular isolation from the hubbub of the world or that it existed (if it existed at all) only in, or indeed only as, that hubbub itself. The great need was, therefore, to attempt to show, once again, how truth and hubbub, dialectic and rhetoric, idealism and realism, theory and action, word and thing, God and human beings — could belong together in their radical difference and insuperable inequality.

  1. The Egyptian elaboration of ontology as ontologies, situated at the very dawn of recorded history, points back into prehistory as if the matter had been contemplated forever. For discussion of the gigantomachia of ontologies in early Egyptian mythology see Mis-taking McLuhan (Kroker 2) and Assmann on the battle between Horus and Seth.
  2. “Hegel develops a most convincing thesis that we can understand reality only by taking it in all its concreteness. Reason is not an external criterion but exists only as embodied in the phenomena of experience. We have only to observe the facts of experience as they unfold, and detect, if we can, the laws involved in them. (…) His principal effort was aimed to show that truth was embodied in the actual and that, between thought and reality, between the ideal and the real, there is no separation.” (Meredith thesis, p72-73) “No separation” — but also no equality!
  3. “Platon und Aristoteles lehren, daß Gott nicht neidisch ist und die Erkenntnis seiner und der Wahrheit den Menschen nicht vorenthält. Was wäre es denn anders als Neid, wenn Gott das Wissen von Gott dem Bewußtsein versagte; er hätte demselben somit alle Wahrheit versagt, denn Gott ist allein das Wahre; was sonst wahr ist und etwa kein göttlicher Inhalt zu sein scheint, ist nur wahr, insofern es in ihm gegründet ist und aus ihm erkannt wird; das übrige daran ist zeitliche Erscheinung. Die Erkenntnis Gottes, der Wahrheit, ist allein das den Menschen über das Tier Erhebende, ihn Auszeichnende und ihn Beglückende oder vielmehr Beseligende, nach Platon und Aristoteles wie nach der christlichen Lehre.” (Hegel, ‘Vorrede zu Hinrichs Religionsphilosophie‘ = Friedrich Wilhelm Hinrich, Die Religion in inneren Verhältnisse zur Wissenschaft, 1822)

McLuhan: ‘The Global Lewis’

McLuhan’s short contribution to the Lewisletter (original series #5, October 1976) is available online at the excellent Wyndham Lewis Society website.

The Global Lewis

Marshall McLuhan has written very kindly of the Lewisletter and suggested as a theme for an issue “Windy at Rugby” — or Lewis’s schoolboy adventures. “He was exceedingly proսd of having been the rare recipient of the sixth licking, i.e. in one day he received six separate lickings. He said that having received the fifth, he suddenly realized he was near immortality, and hastened round to the prefect’s door to smash his tennis ball against it until he qualified for the sixth licking.”

McLuhan has a number of interesting anecdotes of Lewis in America: “Once, when I was recording his voice in St. Louis on a little home recorder, he was amazed to hear his voice: ‘I sound like a bloody Englishman, and thought that I had a good American accent!’ It must have been the first time he had ever heard a recording of his own Voice.”

“My first meeting with Lewis occurred as a result of a letter I received from my mother who had heard him on the Christian Culture Series. His theme was [Georges] Roualt, ‘Painter of Original Sin’.1 Lewis delivered this lecture at the Book Cadillac Hotel in Detroit ー it must have been in 1944.2 Having checked that he was the Wyndham Lewis, the ogre of Bloomsbury, I got on the train with my friend Felix Giovanelli, of the Modern Language Department at St. Louis University. We found Lewis in a basement apartment in the heart of Windsor, and he told is how lucky he had been to find it. He had simply stood on the street, asking passers-by if they knew of any available space for rent. Lewis accepted us at once, with no kind of formality, and we gradually formed the project to bring him to St. Louis where we hoped to find him some painting commissions and some lectures. We were sufficiently successful in this to justify his coming to St. Louis with [his wife] Froanna. One bit of luck occurred when I discovered through a neighbour in St. Louis (Mrs [Martha] Gellhorn, mother-in-law of Ernest Hemingway) that [Joseph] Erlanger, the [1944] Nobel Prize winner in Physics at Washington University in St. Louis, was to have his portrait done. When speaking to Mrs. Gelhorn, I proposed Lewis as a worthy painter to do the Erlanger portrait and she at once phoned Hemingway in Cuba and asked him directly about whether she should commission Lewis for the job. Hemingway promptly said “yes” and gave Lewis an enthusiastic build-up , With the result that Lewis did the painting for $1,500.00. This act of Hemingway’s is not insignificant in view of the rage that he had felt when ‘The Dumb Օx’ essay appeared in Men Without Art.”

  1. In ‘Wyndham Lewis at Windsor‘, Stanley Murphy, the longtime head of the Christian Culture Series, gives the title of the lecture as ‘Religion and the Artist’ (Canadian Literature #35, Winter 1968, p 11).
  2. Murphy gives the date as January 1943. In fact, since McLuhan and Giovanelli first visited Lewis in the summer of 1943, McLuhan’s 1944 date cannot be correct.

Lewis in 1943: “The Frontiers of Art or the Cultural Melting Pot”

An announcement in the Detroit Free Press on November 28, 1943, page 50, read:

Wyndham Lewis to Lecture
Novelist, poet, critic, philosopher and painter, Wyndham Lewis will lecture on ‘The Frontiers of Art” Tuesday evening in the Detroit Institute of Arts, developing his belief that in the world of the future national or nationalist cultures must disappear.  He sees in the United States a preview of a forthcoming international “cultural melting pot.”
Lewis will remain at Assumption College, Windsor, throughout December to complete a series of lectures, later to be published in book form, on the duality at the root of American political life.

McLuhan was open about his intellectual debt, or debts, to Wyndham Lewis.  One of these is clear in a passage from the beginning of this lecture:

The day of closed systems, of watertight group-consciousness, are at an end. With television tomorrow causing us to be physically present (in our living room, with one of its walls a screen for long distance projections) at contemporaneous happenings all over the earth: with the vast development in the immediate future  of airtravel, which will abolish distance, and strangeness: with the cultural standardisation which has already resulted, and must in the future increasingly result, from this — with all these and many other technological devices expanding our horizons and making a nonsense of the old-fashioned partitions and locked doors of our earthly habitat (…) national or nationalist (…) cultures must disappear.1

In fact in a 1929 essay, “A World Art and Tradition”, he had already observed that “the Earth has become one place, instead of a romantic tribal patchwork of places.”

Further strong influences on McLuhan from Lewis included his blasting style, his use and abuse of masks, his delineations of human types, his concern with varieties of space and time, his insights into nihilism2 and his fascination with the “magnetic city”, especially its warp of “the human dimension”3Many of these McLuhan would develop in reverse, probing how to counteract or how to preserve when Lewis saw an unstoppable transformative force at work. Across such differences, however, above all in regard to religion, Lewis gave McLuhan a model for the use and development of his childish eye which, like Lewis’, could see very well that the emperor had no clothes.

 
  1. This passage from Lewis’s lecture has appeared, with slight variations, in Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis, Paul O’Keeffe, 2000, p 472; and in Counterblasting Canada: Marshall McLuhan, Wyndham Lewis, Wilfred Watson, and Sheila Watson, ed Gregory Betts, Paul Hjartarson, Kristine Smitka, 2016, p 71. The original lecture is available in the Lewis collections in both Victoria and Cornell.
  2. And it is precisely the courage of Lewis in pushing the Cartesian and Plotinian angelism to the logical point of the extinction of humanism and personality that gives his work such importance in the new age of technology. For, on the plane of applied science we have fashioned a Plotinian world-culture which implements the non-human and superhuman doctrines of neo-Platonic angelism to the point where the human dimension is obliterated by sensuality at one end of the spectrum, and by sheer abstraction at the other. This situation became so evident to Lewis in 1920 that he devoted the next two decades to warning us about and explaining the anti-human nihilism emanating from modern philosophy and physics, as well as our everyday activities in commerce and social engineering”. (Nihilism Exposed, 1955)
  3. See note 2 above.

McLuhan’s realism 6: dialectics and erudition not enough

Hutchins and Adler have part of the solution. But they are emotional illiterates. Dialectics and erudition are needed, but, without the sharp focusing of training in moral sensibility, futile. (McLuhan to Clement McNaspy, Christmas 1945, Letters 180)1

Throughout the 1940s McLuhan (then in his 30s) was concerned to define a principle that would avoid both of two extremes in contemporary educational theory (and in its implicated epistemology, sociology and ontology): on the one hand, the Dewey-progressive wing; on the other, the Hutchins-Adler wing.

He had long seen education as taking place primarily outside of school:

It is, of course, mistaken to suppose that education in any important sense is connected with the schoolroom. Education is the sum total of all those ideas and objects pressing in on the mind every hour of the waking day. (‘Public School Education’, The ManitobanOct 17,1933!)

The ‘education’ principle to be defined was therefore a kind of principle of principles that would embrace — better illuminate — all the foundationally interconnected areas of life.2 As he wrote in the same Christmas 1945 letter to McNaspy:

This job must be conducted on every front — every phase of the press, book-rackets, music, cinema, education, economics. (Letters 180)

To this end, a critique of both the Hutchins-Adler wing and the Dewey-progressive wing of education theory was needed. Whereas most of McLuhan’s contemporary 1946 essay ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’ (Classical Journal, 41:4, 156-62) came down clearly in favor of the Hutchins-Adler wing against the Dewey-progressive wing3, perhaps because McLuhan was considering with Cleanth Brooks how the University of Chicago might be enlisted in their revolutionary education program (reflected in McLuhan’s 1947 proposal to Hutchins), the essay concludes by subordinating both wings to a third principle of their mutual implication:

Between the speculative dialectician and scientist [here the Dewey-progressive wing] who says that “the glory of man is to know the truth by my methods,” and the eloquent moralist who says that “the bliss of man is good government carried on by copiously eloquent and wise citizens” [here the Hutchins-Adler wing]4there need be no conflict. Conflict, however, will inevitably arise between these parties when either attempts to capture the entire education of an age or a country.5

When, that is, the sides ignore the principle of the original unity bonding them in their difference.

 

  1. In the unpublished ‘Failure at Chicago’, envisioned as a part of The American Vortex project, McLuhan sharply differentiated between the dialectics of Adler and the rhetorical position of Hutchins. Lumping them together as rhetoricians, as McLuhan does in ‘An Ancient Quarrel’, or in the opposite way as dialecticians as he does in the letter to McNaspy, was therefore of rhetorical significance only. In both cases, McLuhan himself contravened his own admonition at the end of ‘Ancient Quarrel’ not to “raise convenient inconsequence to the level of an intellectual virtue”.
  2. Or, better yet, a kind of principle of principles that would reflect the existing illumination providing the original interconnection of all the various areas of life.
  3. Eg: “Hutchins, Adler, and Van Doran have made commando raids deep into enemy territory, and the rage of the immobilized battalions of standard and progressive education is uttering itself in howls against them as “reactionary,” “obscurantist,” “metaphysical,” “unscientific.” (…) The end of education as described by Hutchins is the making of the citizen. The citizen is rational man equipped for social and political life by means of encyclopedic (non-specialized) training in the arts and sciences (the great books program). Special skill in the arts of reading and writing are paramount. The citizen must be fluent, even eloquent, on all subjects. The citizen must know all things which concern the welfare of the group. The opponents of Hutchins, whether scientists, progressive educationalists, positivists, or experimentalists, are all agreed in a specialist notion of human activity. Scientific knowledge and method are the ultimate bases of social and political authority for men like Professor Dewey (…) working with Rousseau’s basic assumption that (only) the state is a moral person. (…) “Teacher and pupil are not isolated individuals. They are both agents of the state.” (…) Whereas Hutchins’ program would make every citizen a potential ruler, the “liberals” conceive rather of the individual as a technologically functional unit in the state. (Alexander) Meiklejohn employs the analogy of the individual as a note in the musical score of society, whereas Hutchins thinks of each person as a complete musical work. Again, Hutchins adopts the classical view of man as a rational animal and hence a political animal. The state from this point of view is an association of autonomous persons. Opposed to this, a conventional representative of nineteenth-century social thought, such as Dewey or Meiklejohn, regards the collectivity as the basic thing. The individual has no nature which is not conferred on him by the collectivity. Man is not a rational animal.”
  4. As seen in his Christmas 1945 letter to McNaspy cited above, McLuhan usually assigned Adler and the Great Books program to dialectic. Here they are assigned to the opposing category of rhetoric which McLuhan associated with the south. (One of the sub-titles to ‘Ancient Quarrel’ is “South vs. North” and its concluding section is “The south vs New England”.) McLuhan was presumably attempting to warm “an eminent Kentuckian such as Robert Hutchins” (‘Ancient Quarrel’) to his ideas. Since the essence of McLuhan’s ‘third’ principle was to conjoin the other two primordially, such sliding between categories was not impossible and was even likely in differing circumstances. Indeed, also the assignment of the Dewey-progressive wing to dialectic in ‘Ancient Quarrel’ is the reverse of the usual procedure — one necessitated simply by the requirement that it be on the opposite side from the other wing. As already noted above, in both of these cases (conjoining Adler and Hutchins and in the varying classification of the ‘wings’), McLuhan himself sinned against his own admonition at the end of ‘Ancient Quarrel’ not to “raise convenient inconsequence to the level of an intellectual virtue”.
  5.  After this highly important observation of principle, McLuhan quickly ended ‘Ancient Quarrel’ with a recommendation for the further study of it such as his Nashe thesis had begun — “knowledge of the history of the present dispute would serve to diminish the fog and the passions aroused at present, and would substitute some light for much heat” — together with the resigned proviso that such study would, alas, “deprive us of that major distraction from boredom which is invariably sought in hasty accusation and warm rejoinder where both parties raise convenient inconsequence to the level of an intellectual virtue”.

Nef on McLuhan’s proposal

If 30-60 men can be found, gradually, and encouraged to talk to one another instead of to the robots they must pretend to talk to for a living, then something may come of it. (McLuhan to Hugh Kenner, January, 1951)

Robert Hutchins gave McLuhan’s December 1947 proposal for an “editorial community”1 to his close University of Chicago colleague, John Nef2, for his comments.  It took Nef only a few days to report back that he found its central object “little short of idiotic”:

Mr. McLuhan’s idea of having eight editors strikes me as little short of idiotic. The responsibility for any journal, if it is to be valuable, has got to be in one place.3

In fact, the tremendous need for such for an “editorial community” is so simple and so obvious that it could not be seen at the time — nor in the 70 years since.

The basic idea came to McLuhan from two publications of Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture (originally lectures at Harvard in 1938), together with his ‘‘A Faculty of Interrelations’ (1942 and variously reprinted thereafter). McLuhan and Giedion met in St Louis in 1943 (the same year McLuhan met Wyndham Lewis in Windsor) and McLuhan quickly read everything from Giedion he could find.

The first lines of the foreword to the first edition of Space, Time and Architecture states that the book:

is intended for those who are alarmed by the present state of our culture and anxious to find a way out of the apparent chaos of its contradictory tendencies. I have attempted to establish, both by argument and by objective evidence, that in spite of the seeming confusion there is nevertheless a true, if hidden, unity, a secret synthesis, in our present civilization.

The great question was how this “true (…) unity” and “secret synthesis” was to be defined and certified. Addressing himself to academics across the spectrum of disciplines, Giedion stipulated:

Our task and our moral obligation is to make order in our own field, to establish the relations between the sciences, art, and the humanities. This Is what is lacking today. [We must] build up the interrelations between the different branches of human knowledge (…) A faculty must be created In the universities which functions as a sort of coordinator between the sciences and the humanities. Scholars will not only have to teach on such a faculty; each of them will have to learn as well. There must be built up a knowledge of methods, the beginning of a common vocabulary. Scholars must have systematic contact with one another.4 (Giedion, ‘A Faculty of Interrelations‘)

This was exactly what McLuhan hoped Hutchins would help to establish, potentially, but not necessarily, in Chicago. In order to fulfill its chief functions — definition of “true (…) unity”, and authoritative certification of it — such a faculty would need to include widely recognized scholars. In his cover letter to Hutchins, McLuhan suggested Eric Voegelin and Étienne Gilson as the sort of academics who would be required.5 Hence the need for an ample budget in order to have any hope of attracting and retaining such luminaries.

Interestingly, and perhaps not coincidentally, 6 months after McLuhan sent his proposal to Hutchins, in June 1948, Harold Innis made some of the same points to a conference of Commonwealth university administrators in Oxford

Knowledge has been divided in the modern world to the extent that it is apparently hopeless to expect a common point of view. (…) I propose to ask why Western civilisation has reached the point that a conference largely composed of University administrators should unconsciously assume division in points of view in the field of learning and why this conference, representing the Universities of the British Commonwealth, should have been so far concerned [only] with political representation as to forget the problem of unity in Western civilisation, or, to put it in a general way, why all of us here together seem [ourselves] to be what is wrong with Western civilisation.6

Innis concluded:

The Universities should subject their views about their role in civilisation to systematic overhauling and revise the machinery by which they can take a leading part in the problems of Western culture [especially “the problem of unity”].

The “problem of unity in Western civilisation” and this way of attempting to address it in the university environment was just what McLuhan had proposed to Hutchins. Compare Innis’ conclusion just given with McLuhan’s earlier proposal:

The first step, therefore, is to perform a basic overhaul job on the academies. To redirect the energies of the American college from the immediate goal of preparing students for local commercial society to preparing students for the fullest kind of citizenship, such as is actually demanded of us as a condition of present survival — that is the task.

As indicated by the repeated word ‘overhaul’ in these passages, Innis could have been nudged in this direction by Giedion’s ideas via McLuhan (doubtless mediated by McLuhan’s old friend from Winnipeg, Tom Easterbrook, who was now a close associate of Innis at UT).7 

What requires decision is the question whether “a common point of view” (Innis) is possible for all humans and their cultures and religions — or not.  If it is possible, presumably this is a conclusion which only the wisest of human beings might work out first of all among some of themselves. This knowledge might then spread out from them, through the power both of their definition of it and of their reputations in their respective fields. Indeed, if such commonality were not defined and publicized in this way, how could it ever (given the conditions of modernity) be established among us?8

Innis’ good friend, John Nef9perfectly illustrated the problem at stake in his reaction to McLuhan’s proposal.  Faced with multiplicity, Nef could perceive only a plurality without even the potential for unity; or, conversely, any actual unity would have to be imposed on plurality by reducing it to singularity:

Mr. McLuhan’s idea of having eight editors strikes me as little short of idiotic. The responsibility for any journal, if it is to be valuable, has got to be in one place.

A third possibility, a real multiplicity which was also at the same time a unity, Giedion’s “systematic contact” among scholars, seemed to him “idiotic”.10

We remain in the same “idiotic” — and incredibly dangerous — situation today.

 

  1. “Editorial community” was McLuhan’s description in his cover letter to Hutchins.
  2. Nef was a long-time friend and correspondent of Harold Innis.  He was also a good friend of Sigfried Giedion. Strangely, it was to Nef that Giedion first wrote in his attempt to help McLuhan find a more felicitous position in the academy. For discussion see Giedion to Nef re a “promising young scholar”.
  3. Memo from John Nef to Robert Hutchins, Dec 18, 1947.
  4. Emphasis added. The physical sciences have “systematic contact” with each other and it was Giedion’s great insight that this was both an intellectual demand for the the humanities, but also the one answer to national and international peace.
  5. McLuhan to Hutchins, December 6, 1947: “Nothing is said (in the proposal) of the actual personnel of the editorial community, but I have men in mind. (…) Eric Vogelein is a “must” for Political Science, I think. (…) Etienne Gileon, with whom I have discussed the project (…) would not, I think, hesitate to join the venture.”
  6. A Critical Review’, in The Bias of Communication, 1951, remarks originally delivered at the sixth Congress of the Universities of the Commonwealth at Oxford, on July 22nd. 1948.
  7. If Innis’ remarks in Oxford were sparked by McLuhan’s proposal to Hutchins, the bond between the two would not have been, in the first place, the study of media.  It would have been their mutual diagnosis of the fate of western civilization and ideas for its rehabilitation and rescue. Remarkably, the same sort of revision may be in order for an understanding of the relationship of Eric Havelock and McLuhan.  Instead of concentration on media, the bond in this case may have been, on the one hand, a shared analysis of literature focused on synchronic structures (for discussion, see The Journey of Aeneas through the Waste Land) and, on the other, a mutual interest in the history of education (for discussion, see Havelock, McLuhan & the history of education).
  8. For McLuhan’s ultimate position on this question, where new science would instantiate such a common view, see McLuhan’s new sciences: “only the authority of knowledge”.
  9. Innis in the ‘Preface’ to Empire and Communications: “I have been greatly encouraged also by Professor and Mrs. John U. Nef and the Committee on Social Thought (…) of the University of Chicago.” Nef was also good friends with Giedion who, strangely enough in the present conttext, wrote a letter to Nef recommending McLuhan.
  10. It is possible that Nef’s objection to McLuhan was not so much notional as territorial. The University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought (now named The John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought) had been Nef’s inspiration and achievement. Given Nef’s friendship with Giedion, the idea may have had as much impetus from him as did McLuhan’s proposal. In any case, Nef may well have thought that McLuhan’s ‘editorial team’ was close enough to his ‘committee’ to require stiff resistance.

The brother’s tale

Poe’s ‘Ms. Found In A Bottle’ fits closely together1 with ‘A Descent in to the Maelstrom’ as the tale of the mariner’s brother — the brother who goes down with the Maelstrom into the abyss. The Ms. ends with these lines:

Oh, horror upon horror! — the ice opens suddenly to the right, and to the left, and we are whirling dizzily, in immense concentric circles, round and round the borders of a gigantic amphitheatre, the summit of whose walls is lost in the darkness and the distance. But little time will be left me to ponder upon my destiny! The circles rapidly grow small — we are plunging madly within the grasp of the whirlpool — and amid a roaring, and bellowing, and thundering of ocean and of tempest, the ship is quivering — oh God! and — going down!

These are the last lines of the Ms. the doomed sailor has time to entrust to a bottle which would later be found floating in the sea — like the mariner who was saved in ‘Descent’. Both the Ms. and the mariner survive the whirlpool: but only by being “cast (…) within the sea”:

At the last moment I will enclose the Ms. in a bottle, and cast it within the sea.

The Ms. and the mariner in ‘Descent’ are bearers of a message from the depths of the abyss. Both record the inception of an unprecedented change in perception:

A feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul — a sensation which will admit of no analysis, to which the lessons of by-gone time are inadequate, and for which I fear futurity itself will offer me no key. (…) Yet it is not wonderful that these conceptions are indefinite, since they have their origin in sources so utterly novel. A new sense — a new entity is added to my soul.

And both describe the strange “curiosity” that arises in this changed state:

To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions, predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death. It it evident that we are hurrying onwards to some exciting knowledge — some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction.

This secret is struck like a spark from an encounter with “the blackness of eternal night” at “the walls of the universe”:

All in the immediate vicinity of the ship is the blackness of eternal night, and a chaos of foaming water; but, about a league on either side of us, may be seen, indistinctly and at intervals, stupendous ramparts of ice, towering away into the desolate sky, and looking like the walls of the universe.2

 

  1. In both tales a sudden hurricane engulfs a ship leaving it with only two of its crew.  In both there is a lesser whirlpool (“the whirlpool of mountainous and foaming ocean within which we were ingulfed”) before which the ship can run; and a greater whirlpool which takes the ship down. In both the mariner telling the tale goes through a profound change which leads him to study his unprecedented situation despite its “horror”.
  2. Poe has the strange “foamless water” in this passage, not “foaming water”. This is probably some kind of typo.  If it is not, Poe may have wanted to draw a contrast with the “foaming ocean” of the lesser whirlpool at the start of the tale — and to emphasize, perhaps, “the blackness of eternal night” in which no foam could be seen.

Proposal to Robert Hutchins 1947

In 1946 McLuhan’s friend, Cleanth Brooks (then a visiting professor at the University of Chicago), facilitated a meeting between him and Robert Hutchins — the UC chancellor and arguably the most influential education leader nationally. Some 18 months later1, McLuhan submitted a proposal to Hutchins for an inter-disciplinary seminar and associated journal.  In his cover latter of December 7, 1947, McLuhan explained:

The enclosed proposal for an “editorial community” is a direct outgrowth of the talk I had with you about the college at Chicago.

The proposal is given below (with the permission of the McLuhan estate). It will be discussed in future posts.2 Suffice it to note here only that it clearly looks forward to the Culture and Communication seminar that the Ford Foundation would finance beginning in 1953 with a grant of $44,000 over three years.  But McLuhan’s proposal to Hutchins, 5 years before, was looking for $200,000 annually (or almost $3million annually in today’s 2024 dollars)!

Surely McLuhan was correct, however, that the extent of our response to our spiritual and cultural collapse would have to be commensurate with the threat. So the astonishing thing is not the audacity of McLuhan’s proposal, but the fact that it has never even been much contemplated, let alone implemented.

*****

Dear Mr. Hutchins:

The enclosed proposal for an “editorial community” is a direct outgrowth of the talk I had with you about the college at Chicago. The project is really conceived with a sense of the urgency and probable brevity of our affairs. But that note of alarm was kept out of these pages since they were intended not so much for your eye as for that of some wealthy sponsor who might occur to you, and who would prefer a longer view.

Somebody of the stature of Henry Luce or Marshall Field is indicated as the “angel” for this venture. Might not that indeed be a plan well-suited to the fulfillment of Luce’s hope for a fourth magazine?

Nothing is said of the actual personnel of the editorial community, but I have men in mind. You, however, would know of some who would be even more suitable. Eric Voegelin is a “must” for Political Science, I think. As for the locale of the venture, that would have to be settled on lines of expediency. Proximity to a big center like New York or Chicago is indicated.

Etienne Gilson, with whom I have discussed the project, approved it, but was most sceptical about the financial possibilities. Given the financial backing he would not, I think, hesitate to join the venture. This fact might be a useful one to hold in reserve, though.3 There are, I am aware, reasonable objections to having Gilson associated with the review. The community idea calls for younger men on the whole.

Should you see fit to approve this plan, would you, then, forward it to Luce or some likely sponsor? Naturally I would not ask such a thing as a merely personal favor to myself, but rather for the merits, if any, of the plan itself.

Very sincerely yours,
Marshall McLuhan

Proposal

[1]4

The Situation

Not since the scholars fled westwards from Constantinople in 1453 has there been a movement to rival the present accumulation of European specialists in the United States.5 And the role of the U.S. as host and custodian of the refugees and their learning can only be envisaged as a second Westward Movement of the scholars.

The resulting stimulus to American learning has been and will continue to be comparable to that which produced the developments in Italy, France, and England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. So that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries will be the American centuries in a sense more decisive than that of economic and political initiative. But without the economic and political hegemony these larger functions and fulfillments would be impossible.

The Possibilities

There is much that is involuntary about the role of Custodian of Western Civilization which has descended on the United States. So far as the larger drama of Western ideas and culture was concerned the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thought of its role not even as a “walk-on” part but rather as a “walk-off” bit.

Everything involved in the trauma of emigration suggested to the emigrants a minimal rather than a maximal continuity with Western civilization. But it is important to realize that not merely external events but also a deep fidelity to the basic

[2]

European heritage which was brought to America, has reversed the conscious intention to attenuate the traditions of the West.

The American North fostered speculation in theology, philosophy, and science, in harmony with the great European current which flowed through Aristotle, Abelard, Albertus Magnus, Descartes, and Locke. The American South typically developed the correlative tradition of “Ciceronian” humanism which cultivates the practical virtues in the attainment of artistic taste, forensic eloquence, and legal and political skill.

Thus the United States has within her own immediate traditions rich points of contact with the entire range of European civilization. And this is a fact of the utmost value at present; since the new responsibilities and tasks do not impose any need for hasty initiation but call only for an enlargement and a comprehension of the native traditions.

As indications of the readiness and ability of Americans to undertake the business of exploration and re-adaptation of the entire Western heritage, consider on one hand F.S.C. Northrop’s The Meeting of East and West [1946], and on the other hand the testimony of Cyril Connolly in the American number of Horizon [1947]. Northrop’s sense of the fragmentary and scrappy character of American life when measured against the entire range of available civilized values and achievements is nothing less than a portent. Especially since Northrop speaks from within a specialized and limited portion even of American experience. He thereby gives evidence of an intellectual resilience and hospitality which is utterly different from that which once prompted the discontented American to live abroad in order to  

[3]

redress the pragmatic bias of life at home. Northrop really proclaims the fitness of contemporary America for the new task, in the very act of calling for major readjustments. Connolly, on the other hand, speaks as an apprehensive Englishman carefully testing our intellectual resources and climate for their immediate possibilities. He, too, provides a verdict of a most favorable kind. America is equal to the new intellectual and spiritual role.

Strategy

The radical deficiency of American intellectual life vis-a-vis the new tasks of revaluation, synthesis, and exploration, is its lack of communal sense. This is true even of the academic scene. But outside the academic world there is certainly no likelihood of finding the leisure, the erudition or the disinterestedness for the work at hand. The first step, therefore, is to perform a basic overhaul job on the academies. To redirect the energies of the American college from the immediate goal of preparing students for a local commercial society to preparing students for the fullest kind of citizenship, such as is actually demanded of us as a condition of present survival — that is the task.

To accomplish this end it would be pointless to talk to presidents and deans and department heads. What must be done is rather to re-energize the entire body of the arts and sciences. That such a flow of energy into long dormant arts and sciences as poetics, rhetoric, and metaphysics has actually occurred is already evident to many. In fact, no such major revisions have taken place within the main provinces of human knowledge since the time of Hume and Kant.

[4]

At the end of the eighteenth century the main lines of human thought and action had been established for the ensuing century and a half. And in England and America the major means of making effective the new adjustments in the arts and sciences was the Edinburgh Review. In this Review the consequences of the positions of Adam Smith, Bentham, and Hume were thrashed out for and by economists, historians, philologists, critics, and scientists. What the French encyclopedists had been to France, the Edinburgh Review was for England and America. All the provinces of learning and investigation were opened up to discussion and revaluation. The due inter-relation between them was decided and the degree of cognizance which one was to take of the other was considered and settled.

That great positivist synthesis lasted until the time of Herbert Spencer and petered out in the popular fantasies of the encyclopedic H.G. Wells. Meantime it was increasingly challenged by the more speculative synthesis which stemmed from Vico and Hegel and was carried on through Marx on the economic side and through Nietzsche on the psychological and philological fronts. However, it has never been understood that the second-rate character of the English and American nineteenth century as compared with the German and French was owing to the German and French having adopted psychological rather than the biological experience as the source of the guiding analogies for the synthesis of social study and discussion. Adam Smith introduced into the

[5]

intellectual currency the analogy of a vague evolutionary providence operating through both human and animal appetites. This analogy fructified the minds of Malthus and Darwin. But it was analogy quite incapable of stimulating the great anthropological and cultural histories which, under Viconian and Hegelian inspiration, appeared on the continent. Sir James Frazer and Arnold Toynbee are by-products of Max Muller and Oswald Spengler rather than of their own traditions.

Every age has its reigning analogy in terms of which it orients itself with respect to the past and directs its energies through the present to the future. To be contemporary in the good sense is to be aware of this analogy. To be “ahead of the time” is to be critically aware of the analogy. That is, to be aware that it is only one analogy. To be creative and directive of the currents of the age is, while admitting the limitations of the dominant analogy, to carry out as complete as extension and synthesis of the arts and sciences as it will permit. But also to explore as much new terrain in each art and science as it will allow. To recover as much of the past as can be made creatively relevant to the present. To be aware of the past as presently useful and of much of the present as already irrelevant — all this is to be a contemporary mind. And this mode of awareness is itself based on an analogy derived from relativity physics (as also from the correlated Jungian conception of the collective consciousness of the race) whose usefulness to a society faced with the problems of world government and international community is as immense as it is as yet unexploited.

[6]

Tactics

To impinge at the most decisive point with the most adequate materials. To this end it is proposed that there be established a Review of an entirely new sort. It will consist of eight or ten full-time editors who will for the most part write it. Each editor is to be a specialist. but a specialist with encyclopedic interests and tendencies. A genuine intellectual community is indispensable. The first business of the editors will be during some months to conduct a mutual inquisition into each other’s specialty and to develop a full sense of the congruities of method and pursuit among their specialized interests. The study of methods and results is to be both of investigation and transmission or pedagogy. The editors should represent at least

  • Philosophy (metaphysics, logic, cosmology)
  • Mathematical Physics
  • Political Science
  • Anthropology
  • Analytical Psychology
  • Philology (classics, modern languages, art, music, history. and criticism)

Associated with each of the permanent editors should be two or more temporary editorial fellows recruited on a leave-of-absence basis from the universities. These men would be selected with regard to such considerations as the following:

(a) Youth and ability to discuss and express the problems of their specialized fields

[7]

(b) Advanced development of some new concepts in their fields.

(c) Variety of experience at several leading institutions.

The reason for this selection is two-fold. First to insure a fresh flow of perceptions and problems to the editorial community.  Second, to provide a free flow of editorial influence into the major institutions of the country.

Program

The procedure of the review would be to present, in the first place, a clear picture of the total situation in each province of knowledge. This would also involve a thorough critique of each subject and of the best methods of pursuing and teaching it. A sharp scrutiny of the actual pursuits and teaching methods at the dominant institutions would, even as a rhetorical strategy, assure an attentive body of readers among the entire faculties and graduate students of the universities.

The contents of the Review would include new contributions to specialized studies; but a press associated with the Review could, in general, handle such matters more expediently. More typically the contents would follow the lines of definitely established projects, doing on an advanced level what Fortune magazine does for the casual reader. The method of each project would ideally be that of genetic investigation of each problem. The genetic method insures a maximum of comprehension with a minimum engendering of irrelevant emotion.

For example, F.S.C. Northrop offers an excellent instance

[8]

of the genetic method as applied to the total absence of developed sensibility in American life coincident with the hypertrophy of action. The notable superiority of the Chinese culture in the matter of esthetic and moral discrimination is a fact from which much can be learned. One major deficiency in American life and education calls precisely for redress of the balance between theoretic and esthetic or particular perception and judgement.

The editorial community would function as a super-seminar in which the projects of each person would be submitted to the constant inspection and discussion of all the rest. In this way alone is it possible (a) to escape the intellectual isolation of the present-day specialist and (b) to inter-animate one knowledge with the due life and results of the others.

Finances

Estimated annual cost of projected Review (exclusive of its earnings), $200,000.6

*****

 

  1. The delay between the meeting with Hutchins and the submission of McLuhan’s proposal may have had several grounds. In the first place, McLuhan must have needed time to think through his ideas and to find a way to express them clearly.  This was especially the case, second, that he suspected even before his 1946 meeting with Hutchins that work with him and with UC generally might be fruitless: McLuhan wrote to Cleanth Brooks on March 29, 1946, “I came increasingly to feel that Hutchins was beyond any hope from our point of view, and my tone, therefore, became uncompromising. I’m sure that he’ll put this in the hands of Adler, McKeon, and Crane, but nothing is to be gained by playing ball with those lads” (letter cited in Mark Royden, Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism, 1996, 205). Third, he was unsure himself of the wisdom and goodness of his ideas.  As he wrote to Clement McNaspy at Christmas, 1945: “What an object lesson a Christian has to-day in seeing so much good produce so much ill. Not for a moment do I imagine that I can frame a course of action which will do good. (…) How easy it would be to set up a school on these lines, utilizing the encyclopedic learning of our age. But whether that is desirable?” (Letters 180)
  2. See Nef on McLuhan’s proposal. Some discussion of the meeting and proposal may be found in Marchand’s McLuhan bio, 98-99. But Marchand had not seen the proposal himself and some of the details reported to him are wrong. The connection of the proposal with Sigfried Giedion’s ideas is very important. And Harold Innis had comparable suggestions. Nef on McLuhan’s proposal discusses these ties with Giedion and Innis.
  3. Minor corrections to McLuhan’s cover letter and proposal have been made. So here, the word ‘though’ appears in McLuhan’s letter not at the end of this sentence, but at the start of the next. McLuhan often composed by dictation to his wife at this point in his career and then seldom corrected the result.
  4. Page numbers of the original proposal are given in square brackets.
  5. McLuhan specifically suggested only two scholars for his proposed project and both were Europeans, Eric Voegelin and Etienne Gilson.
  6. $200,000 in 1947 dollars = $2,815,260 in 2024 dollars.

Ms. Found In A Bottle – Edgar Poe

Qui n’a plus qu’un moment à vivre
N’a plus rien à dissimuler. Quinault — Atys [1676]

Of my country and of my family I have little to say. Ill usage and length of years have driven me from the one, and estranged me from the other. Hereditary wealth afforded me an education of no common order, and a contemplative turn of mind enabled me to methodise the stores which early study very diligently garnered up. Beyond all things, the works of the German moralists gave me great delight; not from any ill-advised admiration of their eloquent madness, but from the ease with which my habits of rigid thought enabled me to detect their falsities. I have often been reproached with the aridity of my genius; a deficiency of imagination has been imputed to me as a crime; and the Pyrrhonism of my opinions has at all times rendered me notorious. Indeed, a strong relish for physical philosophy has, I fear, tinctured my mind with a very common error of this age — I mean the habit of referring occurrences, even the least susceptible of such reference, to the principles of that science. Upon the whole, no person could be less liable than myself to be led away from the severe precincts of truth by the ignes fatui of superstition. I have thought proper to premise thus much, lest the incredible tale I have to tell should be considered rather the raving of a crude imagination, than the positive experience of a mind to which the reveries of fancy have been a dead letter and a nullity.

After many years spent in foreign travel, I sailed in the year 18——, from the port of Batavia, in the rich and populous island of Java, on a voyage to the Archipelago of the Sunda islands. I went as passenger — having no other inducement than a kind of nervous restlessness which haunted me as a fiend.

Our vessel was a beautiful ship of about four hundred tons, copper-fastened, and built at Bombay of Malabar teak. She was freighted with cotton-wool and oil, from the Lachadive islands. We had also on board coir, jaggeree, ghee, cocoa-nuts, and a few cases of opium. The stowage was clumsily done, and the vessel consequently crank.

We got under way with a mere breath of wind, and for many days stood along the eastern coast of Java, without any other incident to beguile the monotony of our course than the occasional meeting with some of the small grabs of the Archipelago to which we were bound.

One evening, leaning over the taffrail, I observed a very singular, isolated cloud, to the N. W. It was remarkable, as well for its color, as from its being the first we had seen since our departure from Batavia. I watched it attentively until sunset, when it spread all at once to the eastward and westward, girting in the horizon with a narrow strip of vapor, and looking like a long line of low beach. My notice was soon afterwards attracted by the dusky-red appearance of the moon, and the peculiar character of the sea. The latter was undergoing a rapid change, and the water seemed more than usually transparent. Although I could distinctly see the bottom, yet, heaving the lead, I found the ship in fifteen fathoms. The air now became intolerably hot, and was loaded with spiral exhalations similar to those arising from heated iron. As night came on, every breath of wind died away, and a more entire calm it is impossible to conceive. The flame of a candle burned upon the poop without the least perceptible motion, and a long hair, held between the finger and thumb, hung without the possibility of detecting a vibration. However, as the captain said he could perceive no indication of danger, and as we were drifting in bodily to shore, he ordered the sails to be furled, and the anchor let go. No watch was set, and the crew, consisting principally of Malays, stretched themselves deliberately upon deck. I went below — not without a full presentiment of evil. Indeed, every appearance warranted me in apprehending a Simoon. I told the captain my fears; but he paid no attention to what I said, and left me without deigning to give a reply. My uneasiness, however, prevented me from sleeping, and about midnight I went upon deck. As I placed my foot upon the upper step of the companion-ladder, I was startled by a loud, humming noise, like that occasioned by the rapid revolution of a mill-wheel, and before I could ascertain its meaning, I found the ship quivering to its centre. In the next instant, a wilderness of foam hurled us upon our beam-ends, and, rushing over us fore and aft, swept the entire decks from stem to stern.

The extreme fury of the blast proved, in a great measure, the salvation of the ship. Although completely water-logged, yet, as her masts had gone by the board, she rose, after a minute, heavily from the sea, and, staggering awhile beneath the immense pressure of the tempest, finally righted.

By what miracle I escaped destruction, it is impossible to say. Stunned by the shock of the water, I found myself, upon recovery, jammed in between the stern-post and rudder. With great difficulty I gained my feet, and looking dizzily around, was at first struck with the idea of our being among breakers; so terrific, beyond the wildest imagination, was the whirlpool of mountainous and foaming ocean within which we were ingulfed. After a while, I heard the voice of an old Swede, who had shipped with us at the moment of our leaving port. I hallooed to him with all my strength, and presently he came reeling aft. We soon discovered that we were the sole survivors of the accident. All on deck, with the exception of ourselves, had been swept overboard; the captain and mates must have perished as they slept, for the cabins were deluged with water. Without assistance, we could expect to do little for the security of the ship, and our exertions were at first paralyzed by the momentary expectation of going down. Our cable had, of course, parted like pack-thread, at the first breath of the hurricane, or we should have been instantaneously overwhelmed. We scudded with frightful velocity before the sea, and the water made clear breaches over us. The framework of our stern was shattered excessively, and, in almost every respect, we had received considerable injury; but to our extreme joy we found the pumps unchoked and that we had made no great shifting of our ballast. The main fury of the blast had already blown over, and we apprehended little danger from the violence of the wind; but we looked forward to its total cessation with dismay; well believing, that in our shattered condition, we should inevitably perish in the tremendous swell which would ensue. But this very just apprehension seemed by no means likely to be soon verified. For five entire days and nights — during which our only subsistence was a small quantity of jaggeree, procured with great difficulty from the forecastle — the hulk flew at a rate defying computation, before rapidly succeeding flaws of wind, which, without equalling the first violence of the Simoon, were still more terrific than any tempest I had before encountered. Our course for the first four days was, with trifling variations, S. E. and by S.; and we must have run down the coast of New Holland. On the fifth day the cold became extreme, although the wind had hauled round a point more to the northward. The sun arose with a sickly yellow lustre, and clambered a very few degrees above the horizon — emitting no decisive light. There were no clouds apparent, yet the wind was upon the increase, and blew with a fitful and unsteady fury. About noon, as nearly as we could guess, our attention was again arrested by the appearance of the sun. It gave out no light, properly so called, but a dull and sullen glow without reflection, as if all its rays were polarized. Just before sinking within the turgid sea, its central fires suddenly went out, as if hurriedly extinguished by some unaccountable power. It was a dim, silver-like rim, alone, as it rushed down the unfathomable ocean.

We waited in vain for the arrival of the sixth day — that day to me has not arrived — to the Swede, never did arrive. Thenceforward we were enshrouded in pitchy darkness, so that we could not have seen an object at twenty paces from the ship. Eternal night continued to envelop us, all unrelieved by the phosphoric sea-brilliancy to which we had been accustomed in the tropics. We observed too, that, although the tempest continued to rage with unabated violence, there was no longer to be discovered the usual appearance of surf, or foam, which had hitherto attended us. All around were horror, and thick gloom, and a black sweltering desert of ebony. Superstitious terror crept by degrees into the spirit of the old Swede, and my own soul was wrapped up in silent wonder. We neglected all care of the ship, as worse than useless, and securing ourselves, as well as possible, to the stump of the mizen-mast, looked out bitterly into the world of ocean. We had no means of calculating time, nor could we form any guess of our situation. We were, however, well aware of having made farther to the southward than any previous navigators, and felt great amazement at not meeting with the usual impediments of ice. In the meantime every moment threatened to be our last — every mountainous billow hurried to overwhelm us. The swell surpassed anything I had imagined possible, and that we were not instantly buried is a miracle. My companion spoke of the lightness of our cargo, and reminded me of the excellent qualities of our ship; but I could not help feeling the utter hopelessness of hope itself, and prepared myself gloomily for that death which I thought nothing could defer beyond an hour, as, with every knot of way the ship made, the swelling of the black stupendous seas became more dismally appalling. At times we gasped for breath at an elevation beyond the albatross — at times became dizzy with the velocity of our descent into some watery hell, where the air grew stagnant, and no sound disturbed the slumbers of the kraken.

We were at the bottom of one of these abysses, when a quick scream from my companion broke fearfully upon the night. “See! see!” cried he, shrieking in my ears, “Almighty God! see! see!” As he spoke, I became aware of a dull, sullen glare of red light which streamed down the sides of the vast chasm where we lay, and threw a fitful brilliancy upon our deck. Casting my eyes upwards, I beheld a spectacle which froze the current of my blood. At a terrific height directly above us, and upon the very verge of the precipitous descent, hovered a gigantic ship, of perhaps four thousand tons. Although upreared upon the summit of a wave more than a hundred times her own altitude, her apparent size still exceeded that of any ship of the line or East Indiaman in existence. Her huge hull was of a deep dingy black, unrelieved by any of the customary carvings of a ship. A single row of brass cannon protruded from her open ports, and dashed from their polished surfaces the fires of innumerable battle-lanterns, which swung to and fro about her rigging. But what mainly inspired us with horror and astonishment, was that she bore up under a press of sail in the very teeth of that supernatural sea, and of that ungovernable hurricane. When we first discovered her, her bows were alone to be seen, as she rose slowly from the dim and horrible gulf beyond her. For a moment of intense terror she paused upon the giddy pinnacle, as if in contemplation of her own sublimity, then trembled and tottered, and — came down.

At this instant, I know not what sudden self-possession came over my spirit. Staggering as far aft as I could, I awaited fearlessly the ruin that was to overwhelm. Our own vessel was at length ceasing from her struggles, and sinking with her head to the sea. The shock of the descending mass struck her, consequently, in that portion of her frame which was already under water, and the inevitable result was to hurl me, with irresistible violence, upon the rigging of the stranger.

As I fell, the ship hove in stays, and went about; and to the confusion ensuing I attributed my escape from the notice of the crew. With little difficulty I made my way, unperceived, to the main hatchway, which was partially open, and soon found an opportunity of secreting myself in the hold. Why I did so I can hardly tell. An indefinite sense of awe, which at first sight of the navigators of the ship had taken hold of my mind, was perhaps the principle of my concealment. I was unwilling to trust myself with a race of people who had offered, to the cursory glance I had taken, so many points of vague novelty, doubt, and apprehension. I therefore thought proper to contrive a hiding-place in the hold. This I did by removing a small portion of the shifting-boards, in such a manner as to afford me a convenient retreat between the huge timbers of the ship.

I had scarcely completed my work, when a footstep in the hold forced me to make use of it. A man passed by my place of concealment with a feeble and unsteady gait. I could not see his face, but had an opportunity of observing his general appearance. There was about it an evidence of great age and infirmity. His knees tottered beneath a load of years, and his entire frame quivered under the burthen. He muttered to himself, in a low broken tone, some words of a language which I could not understand, and groped in a corner among a pile of singular-looking instruments, and decayed charts of navigation. His manner was a wild mixture of the peevishness of second childhood and the solemn dignity of a God. He at length went on deck, and I saw him no more.

*****

A feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul — a sensation which will admit of no analysis, to which the lessons of by-gone time are inadequate, and for which I fear futurity itself will offer me no key. To a mind constituted like my own, the latter consideration is an evil. I shall never — I know that I shall never — be satisfied with regard to the nature of my conceptions. Yet it is not wonderful that these conceptions are indefinite, since they have their origin in sources so utterly novel. A new sense — a new entity is added to my soul.

*****

It is long since I first trod the deck of this terrible ship, and the rays of my destiny are, I think, gathering to a focus. Incomprehensible men! Wrapped up in meditations of a kind which I cannot divine, they pass me by unnoticed. Concealment is utter folly on my part, for the people will not see. It was but just now that I passed directly before the eyes of the mate; it was no long while ago that I ventured into the captain’s own private cabin, and took thence the materials with which I write, and have written. I shall from time to time continue this journal. It is true that I may not find an opportunity of transmitting it to the world, but I will not fail to make the endeavor. At the last moment I will enclose the MS. in a bottle, and cast it within the sea.

*****

An incident has occurred which has given me new room for meditation. Are such things the operation of ungoverned chance? I had ventured upon deck and thrown myself down, without attracting any notice, among a pile of ratlin-stuff and old sails, in the bottom of the yawl. While musing upon the singularity of my fate, I unwittingly daubed with a tar-brush the edges of a neatly-folded studding-sail which lay near me on a barrel. The studding-sail is now bent upon the ship, and the thoughtless touches of the brush are spread out into the word Discovery.

I have made many observations lately upon the structure of the vessel. Although well armed, she is not, I think, a ship of war. Her rigging, build, and general equipment, all negative to a supposition of this kind. What she is not, I can easily perceive; what she is, I fear it is impossible to say. I know not how it is, but in scrutinizing her strange model and singular cast of spars, her huge size and overgrown suits of canvass, her severely simple bow and antiquated stern, there will occasionally flash across my mind a sensation of familiar things, and there is always mixed up with such indistinct shadows of recollection, an unaccountable memory of old foreign chronicles and ages long ago.

*****

I have been looking at the timbers of the ship. She is built of a material to which I am a stranger. There is a peculiar character about the wood which strikes me as rendering it unfit for the purpose to which it has been applied. I mean its extreme porousness, considered independently of the worm-eaten condition which is a consequence of navigation in these seas, and apart from the rottenness attendant upon age. It will appear perhaps an observation somewhat over-curious, but this wood would have every characteristic of Spanish oak, if Spanish oak were distended by any unnatural means.

In reading the above sentence, a curious apothegm of an old weather-beaten Dutch navigator comes full upon my recollection. “It is as sure,” he was wont to say, when any doubt was entertained of his veracity, “as sure as there is a sea where the ship itself will grow in bulk like the living body of the seaman.”

*****

About an hour ago, I made bold to thrust myself among a group of the crew. They paid me no manner of attention, and, although I stood in the very midst of them all, seemed utterly unconscious of my presence. Like the one I had at first seen in the hold, they all bore about them the marks of a hoary old age. Their knees trembled with infirmity; their shoulders were bent double with decrepitude; their shrivelled skins rattled in the wind; their voices were low, tremulous, and broken; their eyes glistened with the rheum of years; and their gray hairs streamed terribly in the tempest. Around them, on every part of the deck, lay scattered mathematical instruments of the most quaint and obsolete construction.

*****

I mentioned, some time ago, the bending of a studding-sail. From that period, the ship, being thrown dead off the wind, has continued her terrific course due south, with every rag of canvass packed upon her, from her trucks to her lower studding-sail booms, and rolling every moment her top-gallant yard-arms into the most appalling hell of water which it can enter into the mind of man to imagine. I have just left the deck, where I find it impossible to maintain a footing, although the crew seem to experience little inconvenience. It appears to me a miracle of miracles that our enormous bulk is not swallowed up at once and for ever. We are surely doomed to hover continually upon the brink of eternity, without taking a final plunge into the abyss. From billows a thousand times more stupendous than any I have ever seen, we glide away with the facility of the arrowy sea-gull; and the colossal waters rear their heads above us like demons of the deep, but like demons confined to simple threats, and forbidden to destroy. I am led to attribute these frequent escapes to the only natural cause which can account for such effect. I must suppose the ship to be within the influence of some strong current, or impetuous under-tow.

*****

I have seen the captain face to face, and in his own cabin — but, as I expected, he paid me no attention. Although in his appearance there is, to a casual observer, nothing which might bespeak him more or less than man, still, a feeling of irrepressible reverence and awe mingled with the sensation of wonder with which I regarded him. In stature, he is nearly my own height; that is, about five feet eight inches. He is of a well-knit and compact frame of body, neither robust nor remarkable otherwise. But it is the singularity of the expression which reigns upon the face — it is the intense, the wonderful, the thrilling evidence of old age, so utter, so extreme, which excites within my spirit a sense — a sentiment ineffable. His forehead, although little wrinkled, seems to bear upon it the stamp of a myriad of years. His gray hairs are records of the past, and his grayer eyes are sybils of the future. The cabin floor was thickly strewn with strange, iron-clasped folios, and mouldering instruments of science, and obsolete long-forgotten charts. His head was bowed down upon his hands, and he pored, with a fiery, unquiet eye, over a paper which I took to be a commission, and which, at all events, bore the signature of a monarch. He muttered to himself — as did the first seaman whom I saw in the hold — some low peevish syllables of a foreign tongue; and although the speaker was close at my elbow, his voice seemed to reach my ears from the distance of a mile.

*****

The ship and all in it are imbued with the spirit of Eld. The crew glide to and fro like the ghosts of buried centuries; their eyes have an eager and uneasy meaning; and when their fingers fall athwart my path in the wild glare of the battle-lanterns, I feel as I have never felt before, although I have been all my life a dealer in antiquities, and have imbibed the shadows of fallen columns at Balbec, and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin.

*****

When I look around me, I feel ashamed of my former apprehensions. If I trembled at the blast which has hitherto attended us, shall I not stand aghast at a warring of wind and ocean, to convey any idea of which the words tornado and simoon are trivial and ineffective? All in the immediate vicinity of the ship is the blackness of eternal night, and a chaos of foamless water; but, about a league on either side of us, may be seen, indistinctly and at intervals, stupendous ramparts of ice, towering away into the desolate sky, and looking like the walls of the universe.

*****

As I imagined, the ship proves to be in a current — if that appellation can properly be given to a tide which, howling and shrieking by the white ice, thunders on to the southward with a velocity like the headlong dashing of a cataract.

*****

To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions, predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death. It it evident that we are hurrying onwards to some exciting knowledge — some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction. Perhaps this current leads us to the southern pole itself. It must be confessed that a supposition apparently so wild has every probability in its favor.

*****

The crew pace the deck with unquiet and tremulous step; but there is upon their countenances an expression more of the eagerness of hope than of the apathy of despair.

In the meantime the wind is still in our poop, and, as we carry a crowd of canvass, the ship is at times lifted bodily from out the sea! Oh, horror upon horror!—the ice opens suddenly to the right, and to the left, and we are whirling dizzily, in immense concentric circles, round and round the borders of a gigantic amphitheatre, the summit of whose walls is lost in the darkness and the distance. But little time will be left me to ponder upon my destiny! The circles rapidly grow small — we are plunging madly within the grasp of the whirlpool — and amid a roaring, and bellowing, and thundering of ocean and of tempest, the ship is quivering — oh God! and — going down!

 

Note.—The “MS. Found in a Bottle,” was originally published in 1831; and it was not until many years afterwards that I became acquainted with the maps of Mercator, in which the ocean is represented as rushing, by four mouths, into the (northern) Polar Gulf, to be absorbed into the bowels of the earth; the Pole itself being represented by a black rock, towering to a prodigious height.

 

McLuhan’s realism 5: Cambridge 1934-1935

In two letters to his family from Cambridge at the turn of the year, 1934-1935, McLuhan offered advice to his younger brother Maurice (‘Red’) on the question of “Plato and Aristotle”. Tellingly, the two modern authorities cited in the letters are Chesterton and Maritain. In both letters McLuhan ends by advocating “Aristotle”, aka, a “fleshly” realism.

Now I can heartily recommend GK [Chesterton]’s book on St Thomas as being of use to you in your philosophy. He deals with Plato and Aristotle and their influence on Christendom — incidentally there is a very clear exposition of their theories of knowledge (how we know and know we can know). (…) In any case these ideas are not simple. I remember what difficulty I had. I never understood the importance or meaning of Plato and Aristotle until I read Kant a year later. (…) It is useful broadly to distinguish PI. and Arist as tending towards Bhuddism [sic] and Christianity respectively. Plato was an oriental in mind (…) Aristotle heartily accepts the senses just as Browning did and says: (…) “All good things / Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul”. [“Rabbi Ben Ezra”, #12, 1864]. And that is why great Aquinas accepted Aristotle into Christian theology. (McLuhan to Elsie, Herbert & Maurice McLuhan, November 10, 1934, Letters 39)

As a handbook on Philosophy with especial regard to its historical development I strongly commend Maritain’s “Introd. to Phil.” to you Red. He is the greatest living French thinker and is one of the foremost students and interpreters of Aquinas. Like most French texts it is a marvel of lucidity and order. I have read or dipped into numerous histories (all of which supposed Augustine and Aquinas were spoofers) and which therefore misunderstood everything that happened in society and philosophy after them. It is for his sympathy in this matter, as well as his general account, that I recommend him to you as certain to prove most coherent and stimulating. Lodge is a decided Platonist and I learned [to think] that way as long as I was trying to interpret Christianity in terms of comparative religion. Having perceived the sterility of that process, I now realize that Aristotle is the soundest basis for Xian doctrine.  (McLuhan to Elsie, Herbert & Maurice McLuhan, February 1935, Letters 53)

Rupert Lodge, chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Manitoba, had been one of McLuhan’s favorite professors there.  He had helped McLuhan obtain his scholarship for Cambridge with a glowing review. Lodge practiced what he called “comparative philosophy” in which he treated issues as originating in one of three possible basic outlooks: materialism, idealism and a middling position he sometimes called ‘pragmatism’. In rejecting “comparative religion”, McLuhan was denying that this approach was applicable to religion. Instead, as he came to think at this time (and would continue to do for the rest of his life), it was necessary to hold to a foundational realism with Aristotle, but in such a way that other basic positions were admitted and even justified — exactly in their undeniable reality.1

  1. “Far from turning his back on it (all the “arrogant confusion” of modern thought) he (Joyce) invaded it and took it up into the analogical drama of his art.”  (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters)

McLuhan’s realism 4: Meredith and “mystical materialism”

McLuhan appears to have come to his realism as a self-conscious position in the years 1933-1935 when he was still in his early twenties (age 22-24). Hardly incidentally, these were the years in which he moved decisively toward his 1937 conversion.  His realism tended in theological and ontological directions from the start, as well as in the inevitable epistemological one.1 But ‘theological and ontological’ never implied only ‘intellectual’ or only ‘spiritual’ for him. As he wrote to his Mother at this time:

My hunger for “truth” was sensuous in origin. I wanted a material satisfaction for the beauty that the mind can perceive. (MM to Elsie McLuhan Sept 5, 1935, Letters 73)

His bent towards “material satisfaction” valorized communication both because it (material satisfaction) entailed real engagement with the material world and because the means of communication were themselves material. Indeed, it was exactly because we finite, material, “fleshy” beings are in real communication with the real world that we can appreciate the “beauty” of our endowment:

Now the Catholic religion (…) is alone in blessing and employing all those merely human faculties which produce games and philosophy, and poetry and music and mirth and fellowship with a very fleshy basis. (…) The Catholic Church does not despise or wantonly mortify those members and faculties which Christ deigned to assume. They are henceforth holy and blessed. Catholic culture produced Chaucer and his merry story-telling pilgrims.(…) Catholic culture produced Don Quixote and St. Francis and Rabelais.  What I wish  to emphasize about them is their various and rich-hearted humanity.  (MM to Elsie McLuhan Sept 5, 1935, Letters 72)

Although his Cambridge years (1934-1936) certainly sharpened his understanding of the grounds and implications of such realism, it was already clearly present in nuce in his master’s thesis on George Meredith which was written in Winnipeg in 1933-1934:

Meredith is not a philosophic speculator (…) He has not the philosopher’s interest in disembodied thought or thought uninformed by any practical issues. He has rather the poet’s concern (…) with human passions and motives. He has an attitude (…) rather than an hypothesis which is amenable to logical demonstration (40)

It is not brain or thought alone… (41)

Now for Meredith the road to this excellence, and to joy in Earth is through action rather than through speculation. (…) Not at all “Shall man (…) learn the secret of the shrouded death / By lifting the lid of a white eye.” He has no sympathy with the spirit of perpetual enquiry… (44)

But in effect Meredith says: Man’s spirit and brain, no less than his body, are earth-born. We are not dropped down from heaven above. We are autochthonous. Earth of which we are a part is spirit as well as matter, flame as well as clod. What is spiritual comes out of Earth as well as what is fleshly. It is the unusual sympathy that Meredith shows (…) that caused G.K. Chesterton to write: “The presence of soul and substance together involves (…) things which most of the Victorians did not understand – the thing called sacrament. It is because he had a natural affinity for this mystical materialism2 that Meredith (…) is a poet…” (46-47)

These two, “blood” and “brain”, come first. But the “spirit” or “soul” (…) cannot exist without the other two. (48)

Life is to be lived, rather than examined (59)

Hegel develops a most convincing thesis that we can understand reality only by taking it in all its concreteness. Reason is not an external criterion but exists only as embodied in the phenomena of experience. We have only to observe the facts of experience as they unfold, and detect, if we can, the laws involved in them. (…) His principal effort was aimed to show that truth was embodied in the actual [and] that, between thought and reality, between the ideal and the real, there is no separation. (72-73)

[McLuhan citing a Meredith letter to Augustus Jessopp from Sept 20, 1862] “Between realism and idealism there is no natural conflict. This completes that. Realism is the basis of good composition: it implies study, observation, artistic power, and (in those who can do more) humility. (…) A great genius must necessarily employ ideal means, for a vast conception cannot be placed bodily before the eye, and remains to be suggested. Idealism is as an atmosphere whose effects of grandeur are wrought out through a series of illusions — [illusions] that are illusions (…) only when divorced from the ground work of the real. Need there be exclusion the one of the other? The artist is incomplete who does this. Men to whom I bow my head (Shakespeare, Goethe; and in their way, Moliere, Cervantes) are Realísts au fond. (…) For my part I love and cling to earth, as the one piece of God’s handiwork which we possess.”3 (73-74)

Furthermore, he had already begun to consider these issues (implicated in any attempt at “understanding media”) as they are developed by Coleridge :

The poet plants himself upon his instincts and permits his temperament sovereign sway. And he has quite as much right to do this as the philosopher has to trust his thought processes. In his table talk, Coleridge noted that all men (…) are born either Platonists or Aristotelians. There are similarly, in all times and places, definite types of temperament displaying consistency of conformation. The literary or artistic expression of such temperaments has properly the same validity as has the philosophizing of the Idealist and the Realist. (43)

The next year at Cambridge McLuhan would hear I.A. Richards lecture on his just published Coleridge on imagination, which considers the same passage from the table talk. Along with other discoveries at Cambridge, like Hopkins and Maritain, McLuhan’s existential interest would be engaged through Coleridge and Richards even more in the question of our “fleshly” access to the real and “the thing called sacrament”. 

  1. In a letter to his family from November 10, 1934, McLuhan recommended Maritain to his brother for his exposition of “theories of knowledge (how we know and know we can know)”. (Letters 39)
  2. Two years later, McLuhan would use this notion from Chesterton in the title of his first published paper on GKC himself: ‘G.K. Chesterton: a practical mystic’.
  3.  George Meredith Letters, collected and edited by W. M. Meredith, 1912, 156.

McLuhan’s realism 3: against perceptual engineering

In ‘Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press’ and ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’ (both 1954) McLuhan blasted the pretense of the artist who would be “the signer of a forged check on our [own] hopes and sympathies”. Instead:

The artist has merely to reveal, not to forge the signatures of existence.  (…) All those pseudo-rationalisms, the forged links and fraudulent intelligibility which official literature has imposed on existence must be abandoned. (Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press) 

In this angelic view [“that school of thought for which the external world is an opaque prison”] the business of art has nothing to do with the analogy of cognition nor with our miraculous power to incarnate the external world. It is a means rather to lift us [angelically] out of our [imprisoned] human condition (…) Reality is not to be trusted or revered but to be remade by social engineers. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters)

He recognized that the class of such “social engineers” included many of those whom he himself regarded as the greatest artists of the century:

Talk about blind spots in regions of maximal impact! Looking at The Diabolical Principle [Wyndham Lewis, 1931] just now, I read loud and clear that art must be totally environmental. It must be the content of nothing whatever. (…) Lewis wants nothing less for Art than the power to create total environments for Life and Death. (…) I find it a bit staggering to confront Lewis as a man who really wanted to be Pontifex Maximus of a magical priesthood. I suppose Yeats, Joyce and Pound had similar aspirations. Their priesthood was to create new worlds of perception. They were to be world engineers who shaped the totality of human awareness. (…) The environment as ultimate artefact. (McLuhan to Wilfred Watson October 4, 1964, National Archive Canada)

With the characterization that such art “must be the content of nothing whatever”, the implied charge was that it aspired to be the ground of everything, including itself: “nothing less (…) than the power to create total environments for Life and Death”.  But not only was genuine art called on the contrary “merely to reveal, not to forge the signatures of existence”, but all art needed to be assessed as figure. As a type of finite human making, its ability to express was in the first place a reflection of the prior environmental ground enabling it to do so and even to be at all. This was the conviction at the heart of McLuhan’s realism.

 

McLuhan’s realism 2: “the real things, exactly as they are”

McLuhan did not believe that communication and knowledge (knowledge being communication with certain objects of practical or theoretical interest) can be perfected; but neither did he believe that they can ever entirely fail.1 Instead his notion was that communication and knowledge are always to some degree successful, although always also subject to all the limitations and blindnesses and misunderstandings that inevitably beset our mortal coil.

The Catholic has never underestimated the value or the mystery of ordinary human perception and consciousness. Nor is he likely to overestimate them today. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954)

The creative imagination in the Christian tradition is an intellectual power, not a super-human emanation from “spirit” or from the uncreated divine spark in the human soul. (Nihilism Exposed, 1955)

The miracle of communication is that it happens at all.  If it always happens to some degree, however restricted it may be at times, it becomes somewhat understandable (although never without its mystery) that infants learn language (or that the species does so in the first place) and that humans develop all the arts and sciences that they do. For communication always to succeed, the enabling environment and the potency to function within it must be already present, always and everywhere.  What is called for, and enabled, is to try out different possible avenues arising from this culture medium, to give up the false trails we are always taking in it and to learn with others (itself through communication, of course) how these probing actions can be — and are! — carried out socially as well as individually.

McLuhan particularly considered this sort of fallible but at the same time successful realism in the first half of the 1950’s:

all existence cries out to be raised to the level of scientific or poetic intelligibility. (Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press 1954)

For Joyce and Eliot (…) every artist is dedicated to revealing, or epiphanizing the signatures of things, so that what the nous poietikos is to perception and abstraction [subjectively realizing what is given to it] the artist is to existence at large [objectively realizing what is given to it] . (Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process 1951)

Impressionism and symbolism alike insisted on attention to process in preference to personal self-expression. Self-effacement and patient watchfulness preceded the discovery of the creative process. Poets and artists literally turned their own psyches into laboratories where they practised the most austere experiments in total disregard of their personal happiness. Gradually it dawned on Mallarmé that pure poetry was impossible — a poetry which would have as its theme the poetic process itself [as if the cause and ground of itself]. Henceforth the subject and framework of a poem would be [in the investigation of what must already be the case for “the poetic process” to take place at all:] the retracing of a moment of [ordinary] perception. (…) And so we arrive at the paradox of [= reached by] this most esoteric of all art doctrines, namely that the most poetic thing in the world is the most ordinary human consciousness. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters)

For that school of thought for which the external world is an opaque prison [cf, The bubble of life in Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Havelock and Innis], art can never be regarded as a source of knowledge but only as a moral discipline and a study of endurance. The artist is not a reader of [the existing] radiant signatures on materia signata but the signer of a forged check2 on our [own] hopes and sympathies. (…) [In contrast] the job of the [genuine] artist is not to sign but to read signatures. Existence must speak for itself. It is already richly and radiantly signed. The artist has merely to reveal, not to forge the signatures of existence.  (…) All those pseudo-rationalisms, the forged links and fraudulent intelligibility which official literature has imposed on existence must be abandoned. (Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press 1954)

In this angelic view [“that school of thought for which the external world is an opaque prison”] the business of art has nothing to do with the analogy of cognition nor with our miraculous power to incarnate the external world. It is a means rather to lift us [angelically] out of our human condition (…) Reality is not to be trusted or revered but to be remade by social engineers [and other artistic constructionists]. Joyce is the single poet voice in our century raised not not merely against this view but in wild laughter at its arrogant confusion. Far from turning his back on it he invaded it and took it up into the analogical drama of his art.  (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters)

If communication and the possibility of knowledge are always present, it must be the case that these are to be detected even in “arrogant confusion”.  This is one more reason that McLuhan refused value judgements and their associated points of view.

McLuhan found a particularly revealing expression of his understanding of “a direct approach to everyday reality”3 in a 1952 interview of Cesare Zavattini. He quoted it at length in ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’:

The most important characteristic, and the most important innovation, of what is called neorealism [in film], it seems to me, is to have realised that the necessity of the “story” was only an unconscious way of disguising a human defeat, and that the kind of imagination it involved was simply a technique of superimposing dead formulas over living social facts. Now it has been perceived that reality is hugely rich, that to be able to look directly at it is enough; and that the artist’s task is not to make people moved or indignant at metaphorical situations, but to make them reflect (and, if you like, to be moved and indignant too) on what they and others are doing, on the real things, exactly as they are. (…) to have evaded reality had been to betray it. (…) We have passed from an unconsciously rooted mistrust of reality, an illusory and equivocal evasion, to an unlimited trust in things, facts and people. Such a position requires us, in effect, to excavate reality, to [reveal in] it a power, a communication, a series of reflexes, which until recently we had never thought it had. It requires, too, a true and real interest in what is happening, a search for the most deeply hidden human values — an act of concrete homage towards other people, towards what is happening and existing in the world — Substantially, then, the question today is, instead of turning imaginary situations into “reality” and trying to make them look “true,” to take things as they are, almost by themselves, creat[ing] their own special significance. Life is not what is invented in “stories”; life is another matter. To understand it involves a minute, unrelenting, and patient search. (…) The world goes on getting worse because we are not truly aware of reality. The most authentic position anyone can take up today is to engage himself in tracing the roots of this problem. The keenest necessity of our time is “social attention”. 4 

Here was the project to which McLuhan would dedicate the rest of his life: engaging himself in “social attention”.

 

  1. Many different sorts of investigations in the twentieth century explored areas that had previously been assumed to be uncommunicative and therefore lacking in knowledge interest: dreams and other unconscious phenomena (Freud), relativity (Einstein), psychoses (Jung), mythology (Frazier), suicide (Durkheim), etc. etc.
  2. It was because a “forged check” must ultimately be seen to be worthless that Nietzsche maintained: “With the true world we also have abolished the apparent one!!”
  3. Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters
  4.  Zavattini cited from ‘Some Ideas on the Cinema’, Sight and Sound, 23:2, Oct-Dec 1953, pp 64-69 — an interview translated from La Revista del Cinema Italiano, December 1952.

McLuhan’s realism 1: St Louis 1940

If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see. Ulysses, 3: 8-9

“We have passed from an unconsciously rooted mistrust of reality, an illusory and equivocal evasion, to an unlimited trust in things, facts and people.” (McLuhan, Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954, citing Cesare Zavattini, 1952)1

Our point of departure must remain that which constitutes the work of fine art as we know it when we know it most thoroughly (…) The distinctive kind of act whereby we apprehend this (…) play or picture or piece of music Gilby has called “poetic experience”, which he describes as “knowledge that seems in immediate contact with the real.” (Walter Ong, 1940, citing Thomas Gilby, 1934)2 

the drama of ordinary perception seen as the poetic process is the prime analogate, the magic casement opening on the secrets of created being.  (McLuhan, Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters)

When in 1940 Walter Ong published his first substantial scholarly article, ‘Imitation and the Object of Art’, his M.A. adviser at St Louis University was Marshall McLuhan.  At the same time, Ong was taking graduate English courses with McLuhan.  There is no doubt that Ong’s paper reflected common concerns with his same-aged teacher (the two were born 16 months apart in 1911-1912). Indeed, almost two decades later, Ong would dedicate his Ramus and Talon Inventory, one of his two ground-breaking Ramus books published in 1958, to McLuhan “who started all this”.3

Ong’s 1940 article ends with a reference to:

Bernard J. Muller-Thym, ‘Music’, Fleur de Lis (St. Louis University), XXXVIII (Nov 1938), 50-52. 

Muller-Thym’s 1938 article, in turn, cited Gilby, and was doubtless the source of Ong’s reference:

And we have often wondered whether (…) we should not have to invoke John of St. Thomas’s theory of the way love can act on the mind as formal cause (…) (we referred the reader to Gilby, Poetic Experience, p. 43, since we do not know another work in English which mentions that theory).

Thirty years later, in his 1970 review of The Interior Landscape, Ong recalled this time around 1940:

Muller-Thym in particular was concerned with philosophical and psychological interpretation of sensory activity. The Fleur de Lis, the University literary magazine, in which he regularly did sophisticated music reviews, in November, 1938, published an article of his undertaking to show that in listening to music the object of specifically intellectual aesthetic contemplation was the movement in one’s own senses, which he likened to discourse.4

Now Muller-Thym (born 1909 and so very close in age to McLuhan and Ong) was the best man at McLuhan’s wedding in 1939 and would be the Godfather to his first child in 1942.5 Ong was taking graduate philosophy courses from Muller-Thym at the same time as he was taking English courses with McLuhan. And Ong’s other 1958 Ramus book, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, was dedicated “For Bernhard (sic?)6 and Mary Muller-Thym”.

What can be seen in this mesh of biographical and intellectual relations around 1940 between Muller-Thym, McLuhan and Ong is a common concern with the possibility of articulating the Catholic tradition in terms of a realist account of perception and experience. This was an account which would look inward to the artistic deployment of the senses and of the common sense in perception, on the one hand, and, on the other, outward to art works in language and other media as exemplifications of that inward process. It would do so on the basis of assured communication with reality in perception and language.

The great question for such “immediate contact with the real” was, of course, how it was possible to be mistaken about something or to differ with others about it or to ‘change one’s mind’ in regard to it. “Immediate contact with the real” would seem to complicate, at the every least, such everyday occurrences. This was a question that had been debated at least since Plato’s Theaetetus and would now, through McLuhan and Ong (and Innis and Havelock) take on a new formulation. Namely, how can “im-mediate contact with the real” be compatible with internal and external exposure to transformative multiple media?

It remained to probe whether “understanding media” could somehow resolve this world-historical riddle.

  1. In this 1954 lecture McLuhan quotes Cesare Zavattini at length from ‘Some Ideas on the Cinema’, Sight and Sound, 23:2, Oct-Dec 1953, pp 64-69 — an interview translated from the Italian, originally in La Revista del Cinema Italiano, December 1952.
  2. Imitation and the Object of Art’, The Modern Schoolman, xvii:4, May 1940, 66-69, citing Thomas Gilby, Poetic Experience: an introduction to Thomist aesthetic, 1934.
  3.  Ramus and Talon Inventory: A Short-Title Inventory of the Published Works of Peter Ramus (1515–1572) and Omer Talon (1510–1562), 1958.
  4.  Review of McLuhan’s The Interior Landscape in Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, v12 , Summer 1970, 244-251; reprinted in An Ong Reader, 69-77.
  5. When McLuhan’s next children were born as twin girls in 1944, Muller-Thym became the Godfather of one of them, Mary, as well.
  6. ‘Bernhard’ here instead of ‘Bernard’ could certainly be a typo. Ong elsewhere always uses the latter designation. But ‘Bernhard’ was never changed in the multiple reissues of the book. It therefore could be a further sign (with the dedication itself) of a special friendship within which Ong knew of a genealogical or other connection between the two spellings. It could even be a joke of some sort. Mary Muller-Thym was Bernie Muller-Thym’s wife and a good friend of the McLuhans, especially Corinne. See McLuhan’s letter to the Muller-Thyms from June 11, 1974 (Letters 498).

Havelock and the question of ‘water’

And the dry stone no sound of water.1

When Eric Havelock moved from the University of Toronto to Harvard in 1947, he went through a difficult period.  He was leaving behind many intimate friends, longtime colleagues and a country where he had been intensely engaged, culturally and politically, for decades. He had even had run for parliament only a few years before.  At the same time, in common with thinking people everywhere, he was in shock from the revelations of German concentration camps during WW2 and the American use of atomic bombs in 1945.

His dark mood was reflected in his writing at the time. Here is he is from the abstract for his 1949 lecture, ‘The Journey of Aeneas through the Waste Land

the poetic equation [of the Aeneid] is (…) complicated. (a) The smooth and dignified surface of the theme is continually violated by the upthrust of something emotionally uncontrolled and violent, an internal disturbance of the poetic consciousness which almost cancels the poem’s basic faith in heaven, history, and man. (b) The narrative epic of action is in part an illusion, devised to put on parade a series of states of the inner consciousness. The poem is to some degree a dream, or more correctly a nightmare.

And here are two passages from the beginning of his 19502 monograph, The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man (Chapter 1: ‘The Bitter Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge’):

We tap and scratch the surface of the rock on which we stand and find that it is indeed the rock of ages, printed with the map of a violent and illimitable history. Surveying it, our imagination abdicates and our comprehension of time breaks down. In place of the generations and centuries which mark our own frontiers, we substitute the trackless waste of geological aeons, and so drift back to the formless lava of a primeval furnace. In that day our human race was not, and was not thought of. In those temperatures it had no conceivable place. Such is the conclusion we draw, mechanically and meaninglessly. The reality is kept from us by our self-consciousness. Perhaps if we could put God there, he could make of geological time a furnished room for us once more, for us to inhabit, even though the only voice we heard was the voice of consuming fire.

Who dare say that justice is any more eternal in the heavens? It is a name, a sound of approval, voiced by an ephemeral species to indicate some crawling pattern of preference, on a speck of dust, in the vast halls of space and time. Who dare say that man any more keeps company with angels, in those trackless wastes beyond the sun and moon? Who dare say his intelligence, so long mastered by illusion, so long convinced that it stood at the point of judgment in a measurable and estimable environment, a cosmos organized by a permanent and stable providence — who dare say that intelligence has any health in it, any metaphysic, any revelation above the energy of the blind groping of a worm?

The trope of The Waste Land or “trackless waste” appears throughout. As does the note of “an internal disturbance (…) which almost cancels (…) basic faith in heaven, history, and man”. Almost?

By 1950 such “basic faith” seemed to be threatened by more than a “disturbance”: “If we could put God there”…”intelligence, so long mastered by [the] illusion [of] a permanent and stable providence”… “who dare say that intelligence has any health in it, (…) any revelation above the energy of the blind groping of a worm?” This from a man who had been an active Christian socialist and a firm believer in cosmic and earthly justice during all his years in Canada!

Only a few years before these 1949-1950 texts, in ‘Virgil’s Road to Xanadu’ (1946-1947), Havelock had concluded with these lyrical lines:

And so, as primitive geography merged into the likeness of primaeval cosmology, there began to be heard from far the distant roar of Virgil’s rivers of the world, rising in their subterranean caverns, ranging over the earth from equatorial mountains to the ice-fields of the north. The navigators long ago had sighted landfall and found mighty rivers and explored cataracts at peril of their life. (…) And the geometer and the scientist had listened and told them where they had been. (…) And the philosophers had meditated and learnedly said of water that it surely is a powerful thing and permeates all and controls all and moves beneath us. Surely the earth itself must lie on water. And the poet listened to them all, and his enchanted ear caught the rumble of subterranean seas beneath his feet. Before his mind’s eye magic fountains issued from the depths and sprang into the air. Torrents cascaded between cliffs that had stood since the world began. He felt the icy breath of northern ranges, and was borne as in a dream on the bosom of irresistible currents. The road to Xanadu was open. (3: 18)

The difference in tone between the Xanadu essay and the slightly later passages is remarkable. What had been a delightful dream of “subterranean seas” and “magic fountains” that were “borne (…) on the bosom of irresistible currents” was now — a “nightmare”. Moreover, Havelock was hardly alone in this turn.  With different timing and with different degrees of insight and intensity, the whole world made it. Indeed, Nietzsche had seen it coming 60 and more years before:

Die Wüste wächst: weh dem, der Wüsten birgt!3

The wasteland waxes: vex [comes] to those begetting wastelands!4

Eliot, too, had sensed it 30 or 40 years before (with many others, like Ezra Pound) — leading to The Waste Land in 1922.

The great need was to understand what had happened here and especially to learn if it were definitive or in some way reversible. Or, at least, if not exactly reversible, at least subject to amelioration in some way.

Harold Innis understood the turn as a catastrophic collapse of the time sector in the spectrum of space-time possibilities. This had been caused, remarkably enough, by the hypertrophy of time — too much time had led to the foreshortening of time and even to the loss of time altogether:

The general argument [of my book] has been powerfully developed (…) by E. A. Havelock in The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man (Boston, 1951). Intellectual man of the nineteenth century was the first to estimate absolute nullity in time.  (Harold Innis, The Strategy of Culture, ‘Preface’, 1952)

Havelock had said as much himself. In the face of “the trackless waste of geological aeons”, he observed (as cited above), “our comprehension of time breaks down”.

Innis’ general theory was that cultures are “bound” by some space-time correlation from a spectrum of possibilities ranging from the purely “time-bound” at one end of the range to the purely “space-bound” at the other.  In the middle of the spectrum the two exist in relative balance and it was here alone that social stability was to be found: “a stable society is dependent on an appreciation of a proper balance between the concepts of space and time” (‘A Plea for Time’, 1947).

Associated with time-boundedness for Innis were oral cultures (vs literate ones), the ear (vs the eye), relatively permanent and immobile media like stone (vs disposable and easily transportable media like paper).  Space-boundedness had the reverse associations.

McLuhan took over all these determinations5, especially the derivative one of “acoustic space” (vs “visual space”) and, apparently less noticeably (given the remarkable lack of research attention), arrested time (vs chronological time). But whereas Innis tended to look at the relative weights of the poles of the configurations comprising the spectrum of their possibilities, McLuhan also looked at the implicated spectrum of the relations between such poles (which was, of course, isomorphic with the range of the ratios or relative weights of the poles):

The low visual definition of the environment favored a high degree of tactile and acoustic stress. At this end of the sensory spectrum individuality is created by the interval of tactile involvement. At the other end of the sensory spectrum we encounter the familiar mode of individuality based on visual stress and fragmentary separateness. The visual sense  lends itself to fragmentation and separateness for reasons quite antithetic to the monolithic and integral quality created by the tactile interval. (Through the Vanishing Point, 222)

Corresponding to two sorts of “interval” or “gap”, McLuhan contrasts two sorts of relationship here, one of “involvement” and one of ” separateness”.  At the base of experience is a “sensory spectrum” consisting of a range of relationships between “acoustic stress” and “visual stress”. The meaning of any experience depends first of all on which of these has been activated:

The meaning of meaning is relationship. (Take Today, 3)

But what was it that enabled something like relationship in the first place?

Here again, an indication could be found in Havelock with water standing in for relation:

the philosophers had meditated and learnedly said of water that it surely is a powerful thing and permeates all and controls all and moves beneath us. Surely the earth itself must lie on water. And the poet [Virgil] listened to them all, and his enchanted ear caught the rumble of subterranean seas beneath his feet. Before his mind’s eye magic fountains issued from the depths and sprang into the air. Torrents cascaded between cliffs that had stood since the world began. He felt the icy breath of northern ranges, and was borne as in a dream on the bosom of irresistible currents. The road to Xanadu was open. (3: 18)

The road to Xanadu in Havelock’s understanding was an “irresistible current”, or relationship, between above and below, north and south, consciousness and the unconscious, surface and depth, old and new, etc, and it was exactly such relationship as water that he found articulated in the concluding section of Virgil’s Georgics:

These [tales in the poem’s last section] are focused, if that is the best word, in certain master images, of fountains and rivers, of gorges and caverns, and of rivers in caverns. The first [musical] movement [the tale of Aristaeus] introduces the boy “weeping at the sacred river’s source”. The mother who responds is “in her chamber beneath the river’s depth”; her mermaids reside “in their glass-green abodes”. The boy descends “to the pools set deep in caverns and plangent glades”. This key-note once struck is sustained [in the second movement] in the resonant sea-cave of Proteus, [in the third in] the river bank on which Eurydice dies, [and then in further movements in] the solitary shore (…) on which Orpheus laments, the vasty halls of death through which glides the “awful stream”, the icy caverns of the north, and the gorge where Orpheus’ last cry still echoes down the tide. These [master] images [of water] are the real stuff of the poetry. They interpenetrate the panels of the composition and dissolve their [independent] integrity. (1: 5-6)

Havelock also cited further ancients making a similar depiction, like Plato:

For everywhere over the earth’s surface you have many hollow places, very various in shape and size, to which the water and mist and vapour drain (…) These places all have connections with each other underground, some narrower, some broader, with passages and openings. In this way much water flows from one to the other as though decanted from bowl to bowl. (…) One of the earth-chasms, besides being the largest, is pierced right through the whole earth (…) Into it flow all the rivers in confluence, and out of it they issue again, each afterwards taking on the individual character of the territories through which they happen to flow. The reason for the inflow and outflow of the streams is that the liquid, having no bottom or fundament, hangs suspended in space and moves in tidal waves up and down, and the air and wind about it does the same thing. (3:17, translating Plato, Phaedo 111e-112d)

And like the pre-Socratics generally and the Roman, Seneca, more than half a millennium after them:

Finally, lurking behind the roar of these romantic waters was that ancient pre-Socratic cosmology of the “waters under the earth”, the “vast sea…in the depths of the earth” (the phrases are Seneca’s). This subterranean sea was the source at once of all the world’s great rivers, and also of the circumambient Ocean, to which [source] they all return. (2: 6)

Havelock understood even the form of Plato’s work in this same light:

The dialogue format in which Plato cast his reflections indirectly allowed him to memorialise his master and friend [Socrates]. But there were other reasons for such a literary choice, which lay rooted in the character of his philosophy. Imaginary conversations, with their mimicry of the spoken as against the written word, could alone supply that fluid medium in which the sense of overlapping concepts and interpenetration of ideas might be continuously suggested.6

In sum, water supplies the, or at least a, “master image” of what “interpenetrates” and is therefore what first enables something like language (the interpenetration of sound with sound, sound with meaning, and speaker with auditor), society (the interpenetration of people with one another), history (the interpenetration of times), truth (the interpenetration of mind with reality), and religion (the interpenetration of humans with the divine).

McLuhan’s take on the turn reflected in Havelock’s 1950 Crucifixion book was recorded in a lecture he gave in 1954 before the Catholic Renascence Society:

Today many thoughtful people are torn between the claims of time and space, and speak even of The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man as he is mentally torn in these opposite directions.

This analysis went back to Innis and to Innis’ view of the fundamentality of the variable ratio between space and time. It agreed with Innis that social and intellectual instability results from a lack of balance between the two. What happens in such an unbalanced or “torn” situation is that the fundamental relation or interpenetration of space and time becomes attenuated and even lost altogether. But in the ancient view as presented by Havelock, this was to lose an appreciation for water. Hence McLuhan’s attempt to point out for us fish the water which (known or unknown) binds together and underlies our existing environment — without which we could not communicate or, indeed, be at all:

We don’t know who discovered water but we are pretty sure it wasn’t a fish! We are all in this position, being surrounded by some environment or element that blinds us totally; the message of the fish theme is a very important one, and just how to get through to people that way is quite a problem. (Contribution to Technology and World Trade, 1966)

  1. Eliot, The Waste Land, I. The Burial of the Dead.
  2. Havelock’s Crucifixion of Intellectual Man was released in the UK in 1950, in the US in 1951.
  3.  Nietzsche wrote the Dionysos-Dithyramben in 1888, but had long sensed the coming of nihilism and the devastation it would bring.
  4. My translation: Nietzsche’s singular here (dem, der … birgt) has been rendered in the plural (those).  A different translation, and of all the Dionysos-Dithyramben, is available at the Nietzsche channel.
  5. Cf, ‘James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial’, 1953: “The press exists primarily as a means of spatial communication and control. Its time-binding powers are quite puny.”
  6. Havelock, ‘Introduction’ to Socrates and the Soul of Man, a translation of the Phaedo by Desmond Stewart, 1951.

“The formula of Virgil’s poetic chemistry”

the operation of a sort of tidal wave which swings to and fro through the bowels of the earth. (Virgil’s Road to Xanadu, 3: 17)1

Eric Havelock’s essay, ‘Virgil’s Road to Xanadu’, was published in three parts in the first three issues of the new (in 1946) University of Toronto journal, Phoenix.2 He characterized his essay as a “search for the formula of Virgil’s poetic chemistry” ( 2: 7).3

The essay treats the last 251 lines of Virgil’s Georgics which weave together two mythological narratives: the tale of Aristaeus, god of agricultural cultivation — shepherding, cheesemaking, beekeeping — whose colony of bees dies off and who must find a way to engender it again; and the tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice.

In Virgil’s telling, Aristaeus becomes desolate when his bees die and he appeals to his goddess mother, Cyrene, for help:

His mother was a princess who lived at the bottom of the sea with her mermaid attendants. She heard his cry, and at her command the waters parted asunder to allow her son to descend to the caverns where they dwelt. There he beheld the confluences whence issue with a mighty noise all the rivers of the world. (1: 4)

Parallels with Poe’s Descent into the Maelstrom and with Plato’s Phaedo are evident. Like Poe’s mariner, Aristaeus must descend into the sea to obtain insight that is essential to him; and his finding there “the confluences whence issue with a mighty noise all the rivers of the world” matches Socrates’ description of the aquatic structure underlying the earth in Phaedo (112a):

all the rivers [meet] in confluence [there], and out of it they issue again, each afterwards taking on the individual character of the territories through which they happen to flow. (Cited by Havelock at 3: 17)

By way of anticipation (and as discussed further in Poe’s Maelstrom and Plato’s Phaedo), “all the rivers” with the “territories through which they happen to flow” may be taken to constitute the spectrum of the forms of experience — an elementary table of media.  A spectrum is, indeed, just what Poe’s mariner perceives at the bottom of the Maelstrom: “the rays of the moon seemed to search the very bottom of the profound gulf (…) over which there hung a magnificent rainbow”. A katabasis into this matrix of experience is necessarily chaotic and dangerous precisely because it exacts, willingly or unwillingly, the excision of all particular identity. Such a transformation is recorded by Poe in Descent into the Maelstrom:

Those who drew me on board were my old mates and dally companions — but they knew me no more than they would have known a traveller from the spirit-land. My hair, which had been raven-black the day before, was as white as you see it now. They say too that the whole expression of my countenance had changed.4

Poe terms such a katabasis a journey into “the spirit-land” or realm of the dead — as, indeed, both Plato and Virgil explicitly describe.5 For McLuhan it was to go “through the vanishing point”. 

From his matrix mother, Aristaeus learns that, like Homer’s Odysseus, he must wrestle with the shape-shifter, Proteus, to force him to divulge the knowledge he requires.  But Proteus, too, lives with his seals in a cavern beneath the sea. The journey to the bottom of the sea is in this way explicitly identified with the need to wrestle with multiple forms of being and experience and with the question of how to select the appropriate singular one out of this plural many. This question becomes overwhelmingly intensified once it is realized that it must be answered before the plurality is encountered — if that plurality itself is to be encountered appropriately. But how to select the proper form out of a spectrum of forms before that spectrum is encountered? And further, since identity results from this peculiar sort of ‘selection’, it is eminently questionable just who is to achieve this improbable action.6

It is exactly this sort of unsolvable riddle, akin to that posed to an infant learning to speak, that, McLuhan maintained, can be answered only by “magic“.  And it is just such “magic”, he then added, that is implicated in all human perception and in the birth of all the arts and sciences.

Aristaeus finds Proteus, successfully wrestles with his shapes and finally learns from him, as Havelock describes, that he, Aristaeus, with the loss of his bees and his grief over them,

pays the penalty for Orpheus’ grief. For Orpheus had loved Eurydice, but once upon a time the shepherd god [Aristaeus] had given chase to her upon the river bank, and in her fright she had run upon a snake which had killed her beside the stream. All the hills and valleys wept for her, and Orpheus made of his uncontrollable grief a song, and played it on his harp. Nay, he even went down after her into the vasty halls of the dead, playing all the time, so that he cast a spell over Tartarus, and the spirits were enchanted, and their grim guardians struck dumb. So he was able to draw her back after him towards the daylight of life once more. But at the last moment he looked back, and lo, the spell was broken, and with an anguished cry she vanished once more into the shadows, and all he could do was clutch at the darkness where now nothing was.
His grief and remorse were now beyond remedy. He made of them a song again, and in a cavern of the northern hills he played it continually, casting upon animals and trees the spell of his music. Thence he roamed over the ice-fields, wrapt in his music and his grief, indifferent to all womankind, till the Bacchant celebrants of the orgies of Dionysus turned upon him and tore him to pieces, and cast his limbs in the river. Even then the severed head continued to mourn with its last breath, and the river-bank caught the echo “Eurydice, Eurydice” as it floated down the tide. (1: 4)

Like the mariner in the Maelstrom, Orpheus learns that there is a primordial harmony — in this case, a melody — that encompasses even death.7 If he entrusts himself to this harmony he can penetrate even Hades and retrieve Eurydice. But what he cannot do in the realm of multiple forms is look back (cf, McLuhan’s rear-view-mirror), for this betrays a particularity that is too “desirous of the body” (as Socrates has it in the Phaedo).  It is just such a rear-view assessment that causes the mariner’s brother in Poe’s tale to cling to his familiar ship — the ship that takes him to his doom.

The required excision of particular identity and experience in the matrix of all media can hardly be more forcefully expressed than through the image of Orpheus’ severed head, still looking back for Eurydice and crying out for her, being carried away by the tide. As Plato comments: “the soul that is desirous of the body (…) after much resistance and many sufferings is led away with violence” (Phaedo 108b).

In the realm of multiple forms, humans can and must entrust themselves to the in-between as Poe’s mariner does.  McLuhan: “Managing The Ascent from the Maelstrom [an ano-kato play on Poe’s The Descent into the Maelstrom] today demands awareness that can be achieved only by going Through the Vanishing Point” (Take Today, 13). But as soon as particularity is invoked the in-between is lost. Havelock translates Virgil on Orpheus’ terrible moment of forgetfulness as follows:

Alas, he forgot; his heart’s longing overcame him and he looked round and at once
All his labour was thrown away and the bond granted by the pitiless monarch [Tartarus]
Was abrogated
. (1: 7)

In this terrible moment, the awful might of the in-between shows itself. It appears to be nothing, since it is outside8 all particular being and experience: “she vanished once more into the shadows, and all he could do was clutch at the darkness where now nothing was”. But it is actually the power of “the bond”: the power that separates and differentiates the particular forms of being and experience in their spectrum while yet uniting them in it. And that therefore gives access to that spectrum from any particular form of it. (Poe’s mariner takes this way between vehicles to save himself in the Maelstrom.)

On the mythological level, all that remains is for Aristaeus to atone for his sin of initiating the destruction of Eurydice and Orpheus and to recover his bees in the process of the required expiatory sacrifices. But for Havelock great questions had still to be considered. Especially, what is the relationship between these tales and Virgil’s poetry? Or even, between these tales and poetics in general? Or, as both these questions together may be put, since a science must consider the particular as expressing general law, what is “the formula of Virgil’s poetic chemistry”?

Addressing himself to the magic worked by Virgil in his poetry. Havelock asks:

What is the mechanism of this spell? The answer apparently lies in that level of the mind below the surface of conscious attention to fact, to situation, or to idea. The consciousness moves through a series of image-situations… (1: 5)

These “surface (…) image-situations” in which consciousness moves are sometimes called “panels” by Havelock:

These ingenuities of arrangement lie on the surface, and are the stock-in-trade of the Alexandrians. They exploit the device of juxtaposing items, which are functionally distinct, to form a symmetrical series of panels. Aesthetic pleasure derives from the antithesis between them, an antithesis cancelled by the [the Alexandrians through] purely formal connection. Such is the geometric genius of the Hellenistic epyllion. [But] to stop there is to miss the significant quality [and quality of significance] of Virgil’s specimen. It uses this kind of geometry and yet utterly transcends it (…) The poetry of the whole symphony develops a sustained power of quite another order. (1: 5)

The great question, then, concerns this “other order” lying “below the surface of conscious attention” to “panels” and (musical) “movements”:

These [“panels” and “movements”] are focused, if that is the best word, in certain master images, of fountains and rivers, of gorges and caverns, and of rivers in caverns. The first movement [the tale of Aristaeus] introduces the boy “weeping at the sacred river’s source”. The mother who responds is “in her chamber beneath the river’s depth”; her mermaids reside “in their glass-green abodes”. The boy descends “to the pools set deep in caverns and plangent glades”. This key-note once struck is sustained [in the second movement] in the resonant sea-cave of Proteus, [in the third in] the river bank on which Eurydice dies, [and then in further movements in] the solitary shore (…) on which Orpheus laments, the vasty halls of death through which glides the “awful stream”, the icy caverns of the north, and the gorge where Orpheus’ last cry still echoes down the tide. These [master] images are the real stuff of the poetry. They interpenetrate the panels of the composition and dissolve their [independent] integrity. (1: 5-6)

This dissolution of independent “integrity” through “master images” does not, however, cancel difference:

This kind of poetic composition is not dismayed by the incongruous. Rather, it exalts incongruity into a principle. (2: 4)

What is at stake, then, is a source that does not lose itself in the generation and maintenance of difference, but neither does it cancel difference in maintaining itself in its original-originating primacy. For the Greeks and Romans, this source was often conceived as ‘water’:

Finally, lurking behind the roar of these romantic waters [comprising the series of “master images”] was that ancient pre-Socratic cosmology of the “waters under the earth”, the “vast sea…in the depths of the earth” (the phrases are Seneca’s). This subterranean sea was the source at once of all the world’s great rivers (…) to which [source] they all return. (2: 6)

As Socrates explains in the Phaedo, water outflowing from the source takes on “the individual character of the territories through which they happen to flow”. However, since it is equally the power of their inflowing, it remains their “confluence”. Virgil’s poetry is seen by Havelock as operating through this power:

And so, as primitive geography merged into the likeness of primaeval cosmology, there began to be heard from far the distant roar of Virgil’s rivers of the world, rising in their subterranean caverns, ranging over the earth from equatorial mountains to the ice-fields of the north. The navigators long ago had sighted landfall and found mighty rivers and explored cataracts at peril of their life. (…) And the geometer and the scientist had listened and told them where they had been (…) And the philosophers had meditated and learnedly said of water that it surely is a powerful thing and permeates all and controls all and moves beneath us. Surely the earth itself must lie on water. And the poet listened to them all, and his enchanted ear caught the rumble of subterranean seas beneath his feet. Before his mind’s eye magic fountains issued from the depths and sprang into the air. Torrents cascaded between cliffs that had stood since the world began. He felt the icy breath of northern ranges, and was borne as in a dream on the bosom of irresistible currents. The road to Xanadu was open. (3: 18)

Havelock’s take on the road to Xanadu is that it is a foundational ano-kato dynamic or pathway which Virgil was able to express in, and through, his poetry. The idea may be imagined as a series of panels arranged, however, not horizontally in the Alexandrian manner, but vertically.

The top panel presents tales like those of Aristaeus and Orpheus, both of which involve a katabasis into the sea or into the underworld and a subsequent anabasis from them.

The next panel below consists of what Havelock called Virgil’s “master images” of descending waterfalls and ascending fountains with their own katabasis-anabasis movement that both illustrates and underlies the tales in the top panel.

The third panel shows what Havelock called “a change in levels of poetic description”. Here Virgil’s poetry is seen as itself taking on the synchronic ano-kato movement depicted in the scenes in the panels above it:

The smooth and dignified surface of the theme is continually violated by the upthrust of something emotionally uncontrolled and violent, an internal disturbance (…) which almost cancels the poem’s basic faith in heaven, history, and man.9

A calm surface previously prepared is suddenly and deliberately disrupted (…). The shift, that is to say, from bright light to the colors of gloom, is also a shift from the description of events occurring in the external world, the world of action (…). A change in levels of poetic description has occurred. The poet’s verse has taken a plunge downward below the surface…10

In this third panel, the focus is not on individual images, scenes or tales. Instead, its subject is Virgil’s artistry in juxtaposing different images or scenes belonging at once to “a calm surface” and to a “nightmare” below. Here plural scenes are at stake in simultaneous or synchronic ano-kato relation.  And this sort of incongruous juxtaposition is said to be what constitutes and reveals Virgil’s poetics: “The Aeneid is a work of divided genius”; “Not action, but reflection, and not sinuous sweep, but interruption and arrest, constitute the genius of the lines”.

In the fourth and final panel, Virgil’s artistry as portrayed in the third panel may itself be seen as a product of his own “plunge downward below the surface of the conscious life” where it has been energized and complicated in the “internal world”. Havelock calls this “the psychological dimension”: “the upthrust of something emotionally uncontrolled and violent” producing or reflecting “an internal disturbance”.

The narrative epic of action is (…) devised to put on parade a series of states of the inner consciousness. The poem is to some degree a dream, or more correctly a nightmare.[1.1949 abstract.]

Virgil, according to Havelock, was able to take the energy and complication available to him through this katabasisanabasis dynamic of the fourth panel to craft the poetry displayed in the panels above it.

his enchanted ear caught the rumble of subterranean seas beneath his feet. Before his mind’s eye magic fountains issued from the depths and sprang into the air. (…) He (…) was borne as in a dream on the bosom of irresistible currents. The road to Xanadu was open.11

  1. References to ‘Virgil’s Road to Xanadu’ are given to the three sections in which it was published in Phoenix in 1946-1947 — issues 1:1, 1:2 and 1:supplement — followed by the page number in the corresponding issue. Some background to the essay is given in The Road to Xanadu and in The Maelstrom, Xanadu and Plato.
  2. Havelock was the founding president of the Ontario (later: Canadian) Classical Association and a co-founder of Phoenix, the association’s journal.
  3. Compare Havelock on Plato in his 1951 ‘Introduction’ to Socrates and the Soul of Man, a translation of the Phaedo by Desmond Stewart: “Platonism would seem to be not so much a system — for its quality still eludes the textbook writers — as a chemical solution which impregnates the syntax of the sentences and paragraphs in which thought is deployed.”
  4. Plato describes this moment of transformation of the soul with some frequency: “And here, my dear Glaucon, is the supreme peril of our human state; and therefore the utmost care should be taken. Let each one of us leave every other kind of knowledge and seek and follow one thing only (…) to learn and discern between good and evil, and so to choose always and everywhere the better life as he has opportunity” (Republic 618); “this is the hour of agony and extremest conflict for the soul” (Phaedrus 648a).
  5. For Plato, see McLuhan and Plato 1 – Phaedrus and Er and McLuhan and Plato 9 – on the plain of oblivion ; for Virgil, see The Journey of Aeneas through the Waste Land.
  6. See note 7 here.
  7. Further discussion in “Great change” in Descent into the Maelstrom.
  8. Not to say that it is not also inside!
  9. 1949 abstract for Havelock’s lecture, ‘The Journey of Aeneas through the Waste Land’.
  10. The Aeneid and Its Translators‘, The Hudson Review, 27:3 (Autumn, 1974), pp. 338-370; as discussed in The Journey of Aeneas through the Waste Land, this 1974 essay was developed out of Havelock’s 1949 lecture.
  11. What Havelock here describes lyrically as Virgil’s “enchanted ear” and “eye magic” being “borne as in a dream on the bosom of irresistible currents”, he styled a couple years later as “more correctly a nightmare”. The great question is how this remarkable change in tone, which was by no means restricted to Havelock, took place.  For discussion see the forthcoming post on Havelock and the question of ‘water’.

McLuhan and Plato 15: Poe’s Maelstrom and the Phaedo

Finally, lurking behind the roar of these romantic waters was that ancient pre-Socratic cosmology of the “waters under the earth”, the “vast sea…in the depths of the earth” (the phrases are Seneca’s). This subterranean sea was the source at once of all the world’s great rivers, and also of the circumambient Ocean, to which [source] they all return. (Eric Havelock, ‘Virgil’s Road to Xanadu’, 2: 6)1

In his 1946 essay ‘Footsteps in the Sands of Crime’, McLuhan began to use Poe’s Descent into the Maelstrom as a master image2 for the process of the genesis of human experience throughout its register from sense perception to high theory. It was also the year that Eric Havelock began to publish his three-part essay on ‘Virgil’s Road to Xanadu’ in the then new UT classics journal, Phoenix.3

Havelock’s essay concludes with a consideration of Plato’s description of the waters of the earth from Phaedo 111c-112e. This section of the Phaedo and Poe’s Maelstrom are mutually illuminating and together they supply an outline of what was even then beginning to unfold as McLuhan’s lifetime topic: the soul’s moment to moment katabasis into the fund of “human potentialities” (MB 3) and “potencies” (Innis letter).4  The fund-amental idea is that human beings are at every moment essentially exposed to different media, different basic forms of experience, and that this navigation among media in their plurality (the “worldpool”) is what constitutes the significance, or message, of humans as humans — the enactment of language (dual genitive). The medium is the massage is the message.

In Poe’s story, some authorities are said to hold that the Maelstrom is a kind of axis mundi about which all else turns:

Kircher and others imagine that in the centre of the channel of the Maelstrom is an abyss penetrating the globe

Something very similar from Plato (Phaedo 111e-112d) is cited in Havelock’s essay:

One of the earth-chasms, besides being the largest, is pierced right through the whole earth (…) Into it flow all the rivers in confluence, and out of it they issue again, each afterwards taking on the individual character of the territories through which they happen to flow. The reason for the inflow and outflow of the streams is that the liquid, having no bottom or fundament, hangs suspended in space and moves in tidal waves up and down, and the air and wind about it does the same thing (…) Some waters go right round the earth, coiling once or several times like serpents (…) and sink down as far as they can and come up again. (3:17)

The waters of the Maelstrom are, of course, also “coiling (…) like serpents” and it likewise “moves in tidal waves up and down” so that its “waters (…)  sink down as far as they can and [then] come up again“. Indeed, it is precisely this perpetual change in the horizontal and vertical motions of the Maelstrom (caused by the alteration of the ebb and flood tides driving it) that saves Poe’s mariner.5

At the extremes of the two tides, the Maelstrom is propelled violently into a circular motion (one direction with one of the tides, then its reverse with the other6), and it is this vorticular motion that drives the Maelstrom downward into the abyss like a screw:

As the old man spoke, I became aware of a loud and gradually increasing sound, like the moaning of a vast herd of buffaloes upon an American prairie; and at the same moment I perceived (…) the chopping character of the ocean beneath us, was rapidly changing into a current which set to the eastward. Even while I gazed, this current acquired a monstrous velocity. Each moment added to its speed — to its headlong impetuosity. In five minutes the whole sea (…) was lashed into ungovernable fury; (…) the vast bed of the waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into phrensied convulsion — heaving, boiling, hissing — gyrating in gigantic and innumerable vortices, and all whirling and plunging on to the eastward with a rapidity which water never elsewhere assumes except in precipitous descents.
In a few minutes more, there came over the scene another radical alteration. The general surface grew somewhat more smooth, and the whirlpools, one by one, disappeared, while prodigious streaks of foam became apparent where none had been seen before. These streaks, at length, spreading out to a great distance, and entering into combination, took unto themselves the gyratory motion of the subsided vortices, and seemed to form the germ of another more vast. Suddenly — very suddenly — this assumed a distinct and definite existence, in a circle of more than half a mile in diameter. The edge of the whirl was (…) the mouth of the terrific funnel, whose interior, as far as the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round with a swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice, half shriek, half roar, such as not even the mighty cataract of Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to Heaven.

When Poe ends his paragraphs here with “precipitous descents” and “the mighty cataract of Niagara”, his trope is directed to the kata-basis or going-down of the Maelstrom.

But after that tide (either ebb or flood, as the case may be) reaches its extreme and begins to subside — begins, that is, to reverse into the opposite tide — so does the violence of the Maelstrom subside with it. And the effect is to unscrew it out of the abyss and to initiate its ana-basis or going-up:

a great change took place in the character of the whirlpool. The slope of the sides of the vast funnel became momently less and less steep. The gyrations of the whirl grew gradually less and less violent. By degrees (…) the bottom of the gulf seemed slowly to uprise.

The general atmosphere is ameliorated as well:

The sky was clear, the winds had gone down…

Plato notes the same phenomenon:

the liquid (…) moves in tidal waves up and down, and the air and wind about it does the same thing…

Plato’s description of the physical state of the world in this section of the Phaedo is pointedly accompanied by a matching description of the state of the soul. And both immediately precede Socrates’ execution.  They constitute his final testament.  Regarding the soul Plato says:

if the soul is immortal, we must care for it, not only in respect to this time, which we call life, but in respect to all time, and if we neglect it, the danger [we are in] now appears to be terrible. For if death were an escape from everything, it would be a boon to the wicked, for when they die they would be freed from the body and from their wickedness together with their souls. But now, since the soul is seen to be immortal, it cannot escape from evil or be saved in any other way than by becoming as good and wise [in this life] as possible. For the soul takes with it to the other world nothing but its ability to learn and to change [ἡ ψυχὴ ἔρχεται πλὴν τῆς παιδείας τε καὶ τροφῆς], and these are said to benefit or injure the departed greatly from the very beginning of his journey thither. And so it is said that after death, the tutelary genius7 of each person, to whom he had been allotted in life, leads him to a place where the dead are gathered together; then they are judged and depart to the other world with the guide whose task it is to conduct thither those who come from this world; (…) And the journey is not (…) a simple path [that] leads to the lower world, but I think the path is neither simple nor single, for if it were, there would be no need of guides, since no one could miss the way to any place if there were only one road. But really there seem to be many forks of the road and many windings; this I infer from [all] the [different] rites and ceremonies practiced here on earth. Now the orderly and wise soul follows its guide and understands its circumstances; but the soul that is desirous of the body (…) after much resistance and many sufferings is led away with violence. (Phaedo 107c-108b)

By bringing the state of the soul together with the state of the world and its waters, Plato is indicating that the demand made on the soul is to follow the tropical ano-kato movement of the cosmos.

Poe’s sailor in “The Maelstrom” saved himself by cooperating with the action of the “strom” itself. (Mechanical Bride, 75)

It is the primitive fact and everything depends on whether this is recognized or not. 

Here again the parallel with Poe’s story is striking.  When the mariner and his brother are carried on their ship into the Maelstrom, the mariner gradually “understands its circumstances”, like Plato’s “wise soul” in its sojourn in the land of the dead, and is able to use this understanding to save himself. But his brother remains overcome with fear (too “desirous of the body”) and therefore, as Socrates recounts about the soul that is not wise, “after much resistance and many sufferings, is led away with violence” into the abyss.

Thus it is that the key to salvation in both accounts is what Plato calls παιδεία τε καὶ τροφή: the ability to learn and to change. For “the soul (…) cannot escape from evil or be saved in any other way than by becoming [in its mortal life] as good and wise as possible”. Now becoming implicates change and the most important change required of the soul in this life, as Socrates shows in the tranquil manner of his death, is to value its immortal life more than its mortal one. And for this, as Poe’s mariner concretely demonstrates by daring to abandon ship in the midst of the Maelstrom, the necessity is to be able to learn and to change — radically.

In the utterly different circumstances of the other world, nothing from this life can aid the soul except such an ability to learn and to change because, as Socrates says, it must navigate a road there that has “many forks (…) and many windings” such that “one could miss the way” all too easily. This road “leads to the lower world” — from which ascension may be made to a place where the soul “finds gods for companions” (108c).  Missing the right way, however, leads the soul, like the mariner’s brother, only down — missing, that is, the naturally correlated up.

Implicated in the requisite radical change is a complicated notion of time. Plato puts it in the following way: “if the soul is immortal, we must care for it, not only in respect to this time (τοῦ χρόνου), which we call life, but in respect to all time (τοῦ [χρόνου] παντός)”. There is the time of this mortal life and the time of immortality, both of which, despite their fundamental difference, may be termed a sort of χρόνου; and ‘at the same time’ there is also a third time of critical decision (κρίση) between these, which the Greeks termed καιρός — the decisive moment for learning and for radical change (παιδεία τε καὶ τροφή) which is always at hand.

Poe presents these three times in serial or chronological fashion in terms of the tides. (The etymology of ‘tide’ is ‘tid‘ = ‘time’.)8 There is the flood tide and the ebb tide and the “slack” between them when, so to say, time (tid) stands still. Everything depends on the relation of the soul to the in-between time of “the hour of the slack”.

For McLuhan, the Descent into the Maelstrom is the story of what never ceases to take place, recognized or unrecognized, in every moment of every human life:

Every human being is incessantly engaged in creating an image of identity for himself (McLuhan to R.J. Leuver, July 30, 1969, Letters 386)

This is the moment of καιρός as a katabasis into the chaos of the multiple forms of potential experience — out of which in an anabasis we emerge with whatever form of experience we are ‘putting on’, that is, with whatever form of experience has first been ‘chosen’ there. Our experience is always a product or effect and McLuhan’s whole bent is to inquire backwards after what light it reflects of its prior formal cause.9

For McLuhan, then, what Plato describes as facing the soul between lives is always occurring between moments of experience:

And here, my dear Glaucon, is the supreme peril of our human state; and therefore the utmost care should be taken. Let each one of us leave every other kind of knowledge and seek and follow one thing only (…) to learn and discern between good and evil, and so to choose always and everywhere the better life as he has opportunity. (Republic 618)

this is the hour of agony and extremest conflict for the soul (Phaedrus 648a)

It is because all human perception and experience is generated through such katabasis-anabasis navigation of a labyrinthine vortex, McLuhan can claim: 

One major discovery of the symbolists (…) was their notion of the learning process as a labyrinth of the senses and faculties… (Letter to Innis, 1951)

Just as the mariner and his brother go down into the labyrinth of the Maelstrom, and learn there, or fail to learn there, what decides life or death, so every human soul is momentarily exposed to all the forms of potential experience, to all the possible formations “of the senses and faculties”. This represents the soul’s opportunity to learn and to change and is exactly what is exercised when the arts are practiced and when the various sciences are born. Hence McLuhan’s continuation of his sentence in the Innis letter:

One major discovery of the symbolists which had the greatest importance for subsequent investigation was their notion of the learning process as a labyrinth of the senses and faculties whose retracing provided the key to all arts and sciences.

Arts and sciences are born, this is to say, when the same sort of double-clutch or Gestalt-switch demonstrated by Poe’s mariner in the Maelstrom is exercised in regard to some new domain of nature or society (a domain that is suddenly illuminated only with the Gestalt-switch). A different vehicle or medium of experience (like the mariner’s cask) is adopted through which a new sort of investigation becomes possible. What remained, McLuhan perceived, was to exercise such a Gestalt-switch in regard to this Gestalt-switch process itself. The medium is the message — and is therefore what must at last become the message of new sciences of inquiry.

McLuhan would dedicate the remaining 35 years of his life, often in terrible health, to the attempt to dis-cover and to probe this possibility and great need.

 

 

  1. The bracketed observation re Seneca is original to Havelock. References to ‘Virgil’s Road to Xanadu’ are given to the three sections in which it was published in the University of Toronto journal Phoenix in 1946-1947 (issues 1:1, 1:2 and 1:supplement), followed by the page number in the corresponding issue. 1946 was McLuhan’s first year at UT and Havelock’s last.
  2. See McLuhan on Poe’s Maelstrom.
  3. Havelock was the founding president of the Ontario (later: Canadian) Classical Association and a co-founder of Phoenix, the association’s journal.
  4. Both the publication of MB and the Innis letter date from early 1951. But nearly all of MB was written in the 1940s and the Innis letter, which was a ‘rewrite’, may have been written in 1950.
  5. See “Great change” in Descent into the Maelstrom.
  6. Phaedo 112e: “Now these streams are many and great and of all sorts, but (…) the greatest and outermost of which is that called Oceanus, which flows round in a circle, and opposite this, flowing in the opposite direction, is Acheron…”
  7. Because the experiencing subject is the result of this process, it cannot construct or otherwise manage it itself. Hence the idea that every human being has a known or unknown “guide”, as Socrates says, a guardian angel, or birth day saint, who helps with the navigation of life — if it is acknowledged and attended.
  8. Poe nearly always broaches the “slack” at the turning of the tides in connection with time: “the fifteen minutes’ slack”, “time for slackwater”, “a minute or so behind or before the slack”, “slack water, which we knew would be at eight”, “the time of the slack”, “the hour of the slack”.
  9. “I am not a ‘culture critic’ because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities.” (McLuhan letter to Joe Keogh, July 6, 1970, Letters 413)

Lodge on ‘Science and Literature’

The following column appeared in the Manitoba Free Press, October 10, 1931,  p 11.  It appears to have caught the interested attention of  W.O. Mitchell1 and Marshall McLuhan2 who were then both underclassmen at the University of Manitoba.

Science and Literature
Prof. Rupert C Lodge 

Dept of Philosophy and Psychology
University of Manitoba

I notice that a most interesting controversy is being carried on in your columns and, like the Irishman who asked whether this was a private fight or whether he might join in,3 I wonder whether a student of philosophy might express his opinion. The fundamental point at issue appears to be whether science and literature are, or are not, essentially parallel functions of the human mind. Both parties of the controversy regard science as a body of ascertained truth, such that each new generation starting where the last generation left off makes impersonal additions to this body of “fact”. [Reader] TBR, who believes in the parallelism of literature and science, argues that each generation of writers should similarly start where the previous generation left off and should make creative additions to “literature” and should not waste time on such “literary curiosities” as Chaucer and Shakespeare, who are apparently studied at some length at the University of Manitoba. On the other it is claimed that “literature” is not a “body of fact” to which simple additions can be made but is a unique creation of the human spirit distinct from science and that Chaucer and Shakespeare, unlike an Aristotle or Newton, have an especial kind of significance which makes the study them permanently valuable.

To a student of philosophy, the premises apparently accepted by both parties to the controversy seem unreliable. Science is essentially inquiry and discovery, continued and refined by successive generations of scientists. The content of a scientific textbook does not consist of a body of “facts” or “ascertained truths”, but represents, rather, a cross-section through a particular stage of scientific inquiry, with a history reaching back into the past and an outlook directed toward the future, and entirely dependent upon the efforts of particular human personalities. Science thus represents an adventure of the spirit quite as much as poetry and has quite as much power to thrill the imagination and liberate the mind from instinctive and local prejudices. This has, indeed, always been one of the chief reasons for studying science and it is in this respect similar to literature in its influences. The history of science in many universities constitutes a definite part of the curriculum and it is felt that if the student is to be more than a technician, he will study the history of science in order to acquire background and culture.

Literature seems to occupy a parallel position. A particular epic or drama is not something altogether out of time, but it is the product of its age and can be understood only in its historical relations, and as a cross-section through a particular stage of literary technique. Here, too, it is possible, by narrow insistence on creative writing, to turn out students who are technicians. It is also possible, by a judicious use of the great literature of the past, to broaden and deepen a student’s powers so that, with the background and culture thus acquired, he may be given the chance to create, not merely technical writing, but “literature”. In some universities there is a distinct department of “rhetoric” or “journalism”, which aims at developing technicians and may be entirely separate from the department of “English”, which devotes itself to emphasizing the cultural influences of literature. In most universities, as in the University of Manitoba, a certain compromise is effected in both scientific and literary departments.

As to the actual controversy, TBR is surely right in supposing that science and literature are parallel, and in deducing the possibility of training in the technique of writing without much reference to the great writers of ages which past. But both in science and in literature the study of history is of cultural value, and it is hardly fair to criticize departments either of science or of literature for not turning out large numbers of technicians in their particular fields, unless that is the avowed aim of the departments In question. The primary function of our university departments is, surely, to enlighten and liberate the minds of our students so that, whatever their professions or interests in after-life, they may be able to bring an educated and cultured outlook to bear upon their problems. 

  1. See W.O. Mitchell on Rupert Lodge.
  2. See the following note.
  3. Lodge’s quip about “the Irishman who asked whether this was a private fight or whether he might join in” appears, 40 (!) years later, in Take Today (212):  ‘Is this a private fight, or may anyone join in? – An Irishman’ . McLuhan is known to have used the quip as well in lectures around the same time in the early 1970s. Since he recalled Lodge in his Speaking of Winnipeg interview in 1970, this may have brought Lodge’s quip back to mind.

Innis and “the conditions of freedom of thought”

Science, technology and the mechanisation of knowledge are in grave danger of destroying the conditions of freedom of thought, and, in destroying the conditions of freedom of thought, bringing about the collapse of what we like to think of as western civilisation. (‘A Critical Review’, The Bias  of Communication, 190)

In 1948 Harold Innis gave a presentation at a conference of commonwealth universities in Oxford.1 In it he averred:

My bias is with the oral tradition, particularly as it has been reflected in Greek civilisation, [and] with the necessity of recapturing something of its spirit. For that purpose we should try to understand something of the importance of [the] life or of the living tradition which is peculiar to the oral as against the mechanised tradition… (Ibid)

Fundamental questions were implicated: What exactly characterizes an “oral tradition” vs a “mechanised” one?  Could classical Greece, for example, be said to be “mechanised” once it was no longer only “oral”?  If not, where and how to draw the line between the two?2 And just what is the “spirit” or the “life” of a civilisation or a tradition — how is this knot of questions to be approached?

Innis gestured in the direction of questions like these when he spoke of the need “to make some critical survey” and to render “a critical review” (the name he gave to his remarks when they were printed). But for a “systematic overhauling” of this sort, it was necessary to establish “a common point of view”.  And to achieve “a common point of view” it was necessary to recognize its absence in a time of “the pervasive influence of discontinuity”:

Knowledge has been divided in the modern world to the extent that it is apparently hopeless to expect a common point of view. (…) Western civilisation has reached the point that a conference largely composed of University administrators [like this one] should unconsciously assume division in points of view in the field of learning and (…) should have been so far concerned with political representation as to forget the [cultural] problem of unity in Western civilisation; or, to put it in a general way, (…) all of us here together seem [ourselves] to be [just] what is wrong with Western civilisation. (Ibid)

How had this come about?

The impact of science on cultural development has been evident in its contribution to technological advance, notably in communication and in the dissemination of knowledge. In turn it has been evident in the types of knowledge disseminated, that is to say, science lives its own life not only in the mechanism which is provided to distribute knowledge but also in the sort of knowledge which will be distributed.3 (…) We are compelled to recognise the significance of mechanised knowledge as a source of power and [the associated] subjection [of education] to the demands of force through the instrument of the State. The Universities are in danger of becoming a branch of the military arm. The [critical] problem of Universities in the British Commonwealth is to appreciate [the] implications [of this fact] and to attack in a determined fashion the problems created by a neglect of the position of culture in Western civilisation. Centralisation in education in the interests of political organisation has disastrous implications. (Critical Review, 393)

Innis had a great deal of practical experience dealing with this situation in the concrete, sometimes criticizing government interference in university affairs, sometimes criticizing academics for their myopia and for their failure to address the deep cultural problems of “Western civilisation”. But he did not have a solution in theory to the problem of establishing “a common point of view”.4 It is just here where McLuhan’s contribution must be assessed.5

 

  1. Report of Proceedings of the Sixth Congress of the Universities of the Commonwealth, 1948; also: ‘Appendix’ to Minerva’s Owl (1948); also: Bias  of Communication, 1951, 190-195; also: ‘The Mechanization of Knowledge’, in Staples, Markets and Cultural Change, 1995, 350-355.
  2. The Gutenberg Galaxy may be read as addressing this question.
  3. “The mechanism (…) to distribute knowledge” shapes “the sort of knowledge which will be distributed”: the medium is the message.
  4. Innis could not see his way to “a common point of view” on account of his twin convictions that “it is impossible for (the economic historian) to avoid the bias of the period in which he writes” and that the current period is characterized by “fundamental solipsism”. For references and discussion of these points, see Innis, McLuhan and “the power of metamorphosis”.
  5. McLuhan noted to Gerald Stearn that “(Sigfried) Giedion influenced me profoundly — (reading) Space, Time and Architecture was one of the great events of my lifetime.”  Now in Space, Time and Architecture one of the central points that caught McLuhan’s attention was the following chain of thought: “Historians quite generally distrust absorption into contemporary ways of thinking and feeling as a menace to their scientific detachment, dignity, and breadth of outlook. But one can be thoroughly the creature of one’s own period, embued with its methods, without sacrificing these qualities (of scientific detachment, dignity, and breadth of outlook). Indeed, the historian in every field must be united with his own time by as widespread a system of roots as possible. The world of history, like the world of nature, explains itself only to those who ask the right questions, raise the right problems. The historian must be intimately a part of his own period to know what questions concerning the past are significant  to it.” (6) With Giedion, McLuhan would deny both of Innis’ convictions that there is no escape from one’s period and that the present period implicates a “fundamental solipsism”. For discussion, see Innis, McLuhan and “the “power of metamorphosis”.

“Great change” in Descent into the Maelstrom

Poe’s story reverts over and over again to “the power of metamorphosis”:

about three years past, there happened to me an event such as never happened before to mortal man — or at least such as no man ever survived to tell of — and the six hours of deadly terror which I then endured have broken me up body and soul. You suppose me a very old man — but I am not. It took less than a single day to change these hairs from a jetty black to white, to weaken my limbs, and to unstring my nerves

*

As the old man spoke, I became aware of a loud and gradually increasing sound, like the moaning of a vast herd of buffaloes upon an American prairie; and at the same moment I perceived that what seamen term the chopping character of the ocean beneath us, was rapidly changing into a current which set to the eastward. Even while I gazed, this current acquired a monstrous velocity. Each moment added to its speed — to its headlong impetuosity. In five minutes the whole sea, as far as Vurrgh, was lashed into ungovernable fury; but it was between Moskoe and the coast that the main uproar held its sway. Here the vast bed of the waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into phrensied convulsion — heaving, boiling, hissing — gyrating in gigantic and innumerable vortices, and all whirling and plunging on to the eastward with a rapidity which water never elsewhere assumes except in precipitous descents.

*

In a few minutes more, there came over the scene another radical alteration. The general surface grew somewhat more smooth, and the whirlpools, one by one, disappeared, while prodigious streaks of foam became apparent where none had been seen before. These streaks, at length, spreading out to a great distance, and entering into combination, took unto themselves the gyratory motion of the subsided vortices, and seemed to form the germ of another more vast. Suddenly — very suddenly — this assumed a distinct and definite existence, in a circle of more than half a mile in diameter. The edge of the whirl was represented by a broad belt of gleaming spray; but no particle of this slipped into the mouth of the terrific funnel, whose interior, as far as the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round with a swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice, half shriek, half roar, such as not even the mighty cataract of Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to Heaven.

*

It was on the tenth of July, 18—, a day which the people of this part of the world will never forget — for it was one in which blew the most terrible hurricane that ever came out of the heavens. And yet all the morning, and indeed until late in the afternoon, there was a gentle and steady breeze from the south-west, while the sun shone brightly, so that the oldest seaman among us could not have foreseen what was to follow. (…) In the meantime the breeze that had headed us off fell away, and we were dead becalmed, drifting about in every direction. This state of things, however, did not last long enough to give us time to think about it. In less than a minute the storm was upon us

*

the seas, which at first had been kept down by the wind, and lay flat and frothing, now got up into absolute mountains. A singular change, too, had come over the heavens.

*

a great change took place in the character of the whirlpool. The slope of the sides of the vast funnel became momently less and less steep. The gyrations of the whirl grew, gradually, less and less violent. By degrees, the froth and the rainbow disappeared, and the bottom of the gulf seemed slowly to uprise. The sky was clear, the winds had gone down, and the full moon was setting radiantly in the west, when I found myself on the surface of the ocean, in full view of the shores of Lofoden, and above the spot where the pool of the Moskoe-strom had been.

*

A boat picked me up — exhausted from fatigue — and (now that the danger was removed) speechless from the memory of its horror. Those who drew me on board were my old mates and dally companions — but they knew me no more than they would have known a traveller from the spirit-land. My hair, which had been raven-black the day before, was as white as you see it now. They say too that the whole expression of my countenance had changed.

*

Changes to the weather, the sea, the heavens, the mariner and the whirlpool itself are radical and precipitous. But the greatest change lies in the reversal of the mariner’s fate in the maelstrom: he somehow finds life in “the inmost recesses of the abyss”. “The power of metamorphosis” envelops and constrains, it seems, even death.

The bubble of life in Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Havelock and Innis

In infinite time, in the infinity of matter, in infinite space, a bubble-organism separates itself, and that bubble holds out for a while and then bursts…
(Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1873-1877)

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of the universe (…) there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history”, but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet it still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life. Rather, it is human, and only its possessor and begetter takes it so solemnly — as though the world’s axis turned within it. But if we could communicate with the gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself.
(Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense‘, 1873)  

The researches carried out by modern man have forced him to look back along the corridor of time at prospects which lengthen on the sight, until they exceed the range of his possible imagination. Our civilization dates from Greece and Rome, but we have learned that it was not the first upon the earth. The record of urbanized man, as revealed by the spade, goes back to at least the sixth millennium before Christ. To the Greek and Roman, for whom human history began with the fall of Troy, a previous span of four thousand years would scarcely have been comprehensible, unless it were the epoch when the gods walked the earth, and there were no men. And our own pious ancestors, who dated all Creation by the Book of Genesis, would have been in no better case.
No sooner has the mind accustomed itself to the antiquity of civilized culture, than it must multiply the backward prospect by tens of thousands of years, to envisage the slow evolution of the human race from the ape. And yet that whole incredible story becomes only a day in the history of the earth. We tap and scratch the surface of the rock on which we stand and find that it is indeed the rock of ages, printed with the map of a violent and illimitable history. Surveying it, our imagination abdicates and our comprehension of time breaks down. In place of the generations and centuries which mark our own frontiers, we substitute the trackless waste of geological aeons, and so drift back to the formless lava of a primeval furnace. In that day our human race was not, and was not thought of. In those temperatures it had no conceivable place. Such is the conclusion we draw, mechanically and meaninglessly. The reality is kept from us by our self-consciousness. Perhaps if we could put God there, he could make of geological time a furnished room for us once more, for us to inhabit, even though the only voice we heard was the voice of consuming fire.
Yet even in geological time, could we imagine it, the mind finds no arrest nor any mansion that abides. The astronomer of our epoch, living beyond Copernicus and Newton, strives to fling our thought out into a universe of light-years, where it is wholly and totally alone and alien. Our own rocks that once boiled like the sun, and later saw the dinosaurs wallowing in the swamp, shrivel to a speck of dust, a passing incident. We strive to make this familiar and intelligible by the skill of multiplication, which accumulates numerals to the nth power, by the skill of words, which reduces the infinity of time to the terminology of years traveled by light. But our own species, in our own eyes, has now become so temporary that it can scarcely be said to exist; it has dwindled to so small a span that we can scarcely be said to be perceptible. We find ourselves utterly alone and naked like worms cast into a field. Then how shall we cover this nakedness, which science has at last, and so fully, exposed? In the eyes of the self-conscious man, the intelligent, the proud, the hopeful, the skillful, the masterful, and the moral man, the simplicity of the exposure becomes unbearable, and therefore almost unthinkable. For it seems to destroy those truisms which the nature of our consciousness demands shall stay true. ’Who dare say that justice is any more eternal in the heavens? It is a name, a sound of approval, voiced by an ephemeral species to indicate some crawling pattern of preference, on a speck of dust, in the vast halls of space and time. Who dare say that man any more keeps company with angels, in those trackless wastes beyond the sun and moon? Who dare say his intelligence, so long mastered by illusion, so long convinced that it stood at the point of judgment in a measurable and estimable environment, a cosmos organized by a permanent and stable providence — who dare say that intelligence has any health in it, any metaphysic, any revelation above the energy of the blind groping of a worm?
(Eric Havelock, The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man, Chapter 1: ‘The Bitter Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge’, 1951)

The general argument [of The Strategy of Culture, 1952] has been powerfully developed (…) by E. A. Havelock in The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man (Boston, 1951). Intellectual man of the nineteenth century was the first to estimate absolute nullity in time. The present — real, insistent, complex, and treated as an independent system, the foreshortening of practical pre-vision in the field of human action — has penetrated the most vulnerable areas of public policy. War has become the result, and a cause, of the limitations placed on the forethinker [Pro-metheus]. Power and its assistant force, the natural enemies of intelligence, have become more serious since “the mental processes activated in the pursuit and and consolidating of power are essentially short range”.
(Harold Innis, The Strategy of Culture, ‘Preface’, 1952, citing Havelock, The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man, 991)

  1. Havelock: “Those mental processes which are activated in the pursuit and the consolidation of power are essentially short range.” Innis’ Strategy of Culture was immediately republished in his Changing Concepts of Time (also 1952) and its ‘Preface’ incorporated in the ‘Preface’ of the new title.

A Descent into the Maelstrom – Edgar Poe

1841

The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as our ways; nor are the models that we frame any way commensurate to the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus. — Joseph Glanville.

*

We had now reached the summit of the loftiest crag. For some minutes the old man seemed too much exhausted to speak. “Not long ago,” said he at length, “and I could have guided you on this route as well as the youngest of my sons; but, about three years past, there happened to me an event such as never happened before to mortal man — or at least such as no man ever survived to tell of — and the six hours of deadly terror which I then endured have broken me up body and soul. You suppose me a very old man — but I am not. It took less than a single day to change these hairs from a jetty black to white, to weaken my limbs, and to unstring my nerves, so that I tremble at the least exertion, and am frightened at a shadow. Do you know I can scarcely look over this little cliff without getting giddy?”

The “little cliff,” upon whose edge he had so carelessly thrown himself down to rest that the weightier portion of his body hung over it, while he was only kept from falling by the tenure of his elbow on its extreme and slippery edge — this “little cliff” arose, a sheer unobstructed precipice of black shining rock, some fifteen or sixteen hundred feet from the world of crags beneath us. Nothing would have tempted me to within half a dozen yards of its brink. In truth so deeply was I excited by the perilous position of my companion, that I fell at full length upon the ground, clung to the shrubs around me, and dared not even glance upward at the sky —while I struggled in vain to divest myself of the idea that the very foundations of the mountain were in danger from the fury of the winds. It was long before I could reason myself into sufficient courage to sit up and look out into the distance.

“You must get over these fancies,” said the guide, “for I have brought you here that you might have the best possible view of the scene of that event I mentioned — and to tell you the whole story with the spot just under your eye.”

“We are now,” he continued, in that particularizing manner which distinguished him — “we are now close upon the Norwegian coast — in the sixty-eighth degree of latitude — in the great province of Nordland — and in the dreary district of Lofoden. The mountain upon whose top we sit is Helseggen, the Cloudy. Now raise yourself up a little higher — hold on to the grass if you feel giddy — so — and look out beyond the belt of vapor beneath us, into the sea.”

I looked dizzily, and beheld a wide expanse of ocean, whose waters wore so inky a hue as to bring at once to my mind the Nubian geographer’s account of the Mare Tenebrarum. A panorama more deplorably desolate no human imagination can conceive. To the right and left, as far as the eye could reach, there lay outstretched, like ramparts of the world, lines of horridly black and beetling cliff, whose character of gloom was but the more forcibly illustrated by the surf which reared high up against it its white and ghastly crest, howling and shrieking for ever. Just opposite the promontory upon whose apex we were placed, and at a distance of some five or six miles out at sea, there was visible a small, bleak-looking island; or, more properly, its position was discernible through the wilderness of surge in which it was enveloped. About two miles nearer the land, arose another of smaller size, hideously craggy and barren, and encompassed at various intervals by a cluster of dark rocks.

The appearance of the ocean, in the space between the more distant island and the shore, had something very unusual about it. Although, at the time, so strong a gale was blowing landward that a brig in the remote offing lay to under a double-reefed trysail, and constantly plunged her whole hull out of sight, still there was here nothing like a regular swell, but only a short, quick, angry cross dashing of water in every direction — as well in the teeth of the wind as otherwise. Of foam there was little except in the immediate vicinity of the rocks.

“The island in the distance,” resumed the old man, “is called by the Norwegians Vurrgh. The one midway is Moskoe. That a mile to the northward is Ambaaren. Yonder are Iflesen, Hoeyholm, Kieldholm, Suarven, and Buckholm. Farther off — between Moskoe and Vurrgh — are Otterholm, Flimen, Sandflesen, and Skarholm. These are the true names of the places — but why it has been thought necessary to name them at all, is more than either you or I can understand. Do you hear any thing? Do you see any change in the water?”

We had now been about ten minutes upon the top of Helseggen, which we had ascended from the interior of Lofoden, so that we had caught no glimpse of the sea until it had burst upon us from the summit. As the old man spoke, I became aware of a loud and gradually increasing sound, like the moaning of a vast herd of buffaloes upon an American prairie; and at the same moment I perceived that what seamen term the chopping character of the ocean beneath us, was rapidly changing into a current which set to the eastward. Even while I gazed, this current acquired a monstrous velocity. Each moment added to its speed — to its headlong impetuosity. In five minutes the whole sea, as far as Vurrgh, was lashed into ungovernable fury; but it was between Moskoe and the coast that the main uproar held its sway. Here the vast bed of the waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into phrensied convulsion — heaving, boiling, hissing — gyrating in gigantic and innumerable vortices, and all whirling and plunging on to the eastward with a rapidity which water never elsewhere assumes except in precipitous descents.

In a few minutes more, there came over the scene another radical alteration. The general surface grew somewhat more smooth, and the whirlpools, one by one, disappeared, while prodigious streaks of foam became apparent where none had been seen before. These streaks, at length, spreading out to a great distance, and entering into combination, took unto themselves the gyratory motion of the subsided vortices, and seemed to form the germ of another more vast. Suddenly — very suddenly — this assumed a distinct and definite existence, in a circle of more than half a mile in diameter. The edge of the whirl was represented by a broad belt of gleaming spray; but no particle of this slipped into the mouth of the terrific funnel, whose interior, as far as the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round with a swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice, half shriek, half roar, such as not even the mighty cataract of Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to Heaven.

The mountain trembled to its very base, and the rock rocked. I threw myself upon my face, and clung to the scant herbage in an excess of nervous agitation.

“This,” said I at length, to the old man — “this can be nothing else than the great whirlpool of the Maelstrom.”

“So it is sometimes termed,” said he. “We Norwegians call it the Moskoe-strom, from the island of Moskoe in the midway.”

The ordinary accounts of this vortex had by no means prepared me for what I saw. That of Jonas Ramus, which is perhaps the most circumstantial of any, cannot impart the faintest conception either of the magnificence, or of the horror of the scene — or of the wild bewildering sense of the novel which confounds the beholder. I am not sure from what point of view the writer in question surveyed it, nor at what time; but it could neither have been from the summit of Helseggen, nor during a storm. There are some passages of his description, nevertheless, which may be quoted for their details, although their effect is exceedingly feeble in conveying an impression of the spectacle.

“Between Lofoden and Moskoe,” he says, “the depth of the water is between thirty-six and forty fathoms; but on the other side, toward Ver (Vurrgh) this depth decreases so as not to afford a convenient passage for a vessel, without the risk of splitting on the rocks, which happens even in the calmest weather. When it is flood, the stream runs up the country between Lofoden and Moskoe with a boisterous rapidity; but the roar of its impetuous ebb to the sea is scarce equalled by the loudest and most dreadful cataracts; the noise being heard several leagues off, and the vortices or pits are of such an extent and depth, that if a ship comes within its attraction, it is inevitably absorbed and carried down to the bottom, and there beat to pieces against the rocks; and when the water relaxes, the fragments thereof are thrown up again. But these intervals of tranquillity are only at the turn of the ebb and flood, and in calm weather, and last but a quarter of an hour, its violence gradually returning. When the stream is most boisterous, and its fury heightened by a storm, it is dangerous to come within a Norway mile of it. Boats, yachts, and ships have been carried away by not guarding against it before they were within its reach. It likewise happens frequently, that whales come too near the stream, and are overpowered by its violence; and then it is impossible to describe their howlings and bellowings in their fruitless struggles to disengage themselves. A bear once, attempting to swim from Lofoden to Moskoe, was caught by the stream and borne down, while he roared terribly, so as to be heard on shore. Large stocks of firs and pine trees, after being absorbed by the current, rise again broken and torn to such a degree as if bristles grew upon them. This plainly shows the bottom to consist of craggy rocks, among which they are whirled to and fro. This stream is regulated by the flux and reflux of the sea — it being constantly high and low water every six hours. In the year 1645, early in the morning of Sexagesima Sunday, it raged with such noise and impetuosity that the very stones of the houses on the coast fell to the ground.”

In regard to the depth of the water, I could not see how this could have been ascertained at all in the immediate vicinity of the vortex. The “forty fathoms” must have reference only to portions of the channel close upon the shore either of Moskoe or Lofoden. The depth in the centre of the Moskoe-strom must be immeasurably greater; and no better proof of this fact is necessary than can be obtained from even the sidelong glance into the abyss of the whirl which may be had from the highest crag of Helseggen. Looking down from this pinnacle upon the howling Phlegethon below, I could not help smiling at the simplicity with which the honest Jonas Ramus records, as a matter difficult of belief, the anecdotes of the whales and the bears; for it appeared to me, in fact, a self-evident thing, that the largest ships of the line in existence, coming within the influence of that deadly attraction, could resist it as little as a feather the hurricane, and must disappear bodily and at once.

The attempts to account for the phenomenon — some of which, I remember, seemed to me sufficiently plausible in perusal — now wore a very different and unsatisfactory aspect. The idea generally received is that this, as well as three smaller vortices among the Feroe islands, “have no other cause than the collision of waves rising and falling, at flux and reflux, against a ridge of rocks and shelves, which confines the water so that it precipitates itself like a cataract; and thus the higher the flood rises, the deeper must the fall be, and the natural result of all is a whirlpool or vortex, the prodigious suction of which is sufficiently known by lesser experiments.” — These are the words of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Kircher and others imagine that in the centre of the channel of the Maelstrom is an abyss penetrating the globe, and issuing in some very remote part — the Gulf of Bothnia being somewhat decidedly named in one instance. This opinion, idle in itself, was the one to which, as I gazed, my imagination most readily assented; and, mentioning it to the guide, I was rather surprised to hear him say that, although it was the view almost universally entertained of the subject by the Norwegians, it nevertheless was not his own. As to the former notion he confessed his inability to comprehend it; and here I agreed with him — for, however conclusive on paper, it becomes altogether unintelligible, and even absurd, amid the thunder of the abyss.

“You have had a good look at the whirl now,” said the old man, “and if you will creep round this crag, so as to get in its lee, and deaden the roar of the water, I will tell you a story that will convince you I ought to know something of the Moskoe-strom.”

I placed myself as desired, and he proceeded.

“Myself and my two brothers once owned a schooner-rigged smack of about seventy tons burthen, with which we were in the habit of fishing among the islands beyond Moskoe, nearly to Vurrgh. In all violent eddies at sea there is good fishing, at proper opportunities, if one has only the courage to attempt it; but among the whole of the Lofoden coastmen, we three were the only ones who made a regular business of going out to the islands, as I tell you. The usual grounds are a great way lower down to the southward. There fish can be got at all hours, without much risk, and therefore these places are preferred. The choice spots over here among the rocks, however, not only yield the finest variety, but in far greater abundance; so that we often got in a single day, what the more timid of the craft could not scrape together in a week. In fact, we made it a matter of desperate speculation — the risk of life standing instead of labor, and courage answering for capital.

“We kept the smack in a cove about five miles higher up the coast than this; and it was our practice, in fine weather, to take advantage of the fifteen minutes’ slack to push across the main channel of the Moskoe-strom, far above the pool, and then drop down upon anchorage somewhere near Otterholm, or Sandflesen, where the eddies are not so violent as elsewhere. Here we used to remain until nearly time for slackwater again, when we weighed and made for home. We never set out upon this expedition without a steady side wind for going and coming — one that we felt sure would not fall us before our return — and we seldom made a miscalculation upon this point. Twice, during six years, we were forced to stay all night at anchor on account of a dead calm, which is a rare thing indeed just about here; and once we had to remain on the grounds nearly a week, starving to death, owing to a gale which blew up shortly after our arrival, and made the channel too boisterous to be thought of. Upon this occasion we should have been driven out to sea in spite of everything, (for the whirlpools threw us round and round so violently that, at length, we fouled our anchor and dragged it) if it had not been that we drifted into one of the innumerable cross currents — here to-day and gone tomorrow — which drove us under the lee of Flimen, where, by good luck, we brought up.

“I could not tell you the twentieth part of the difficulties we encountered ‘on the ground’ — it is a bad spot to be in, even in good weather — but we made shift always to run the gauntlet of the Moskoe-strom itself without accident; although at times my heart has been in my mouth when we happened to be a minute or so behind or before the slack. The wind sometimes was not as strong as we thought it at starting, and then we made rather less way than we could wish, while the current rendered the smack unmanageable. My eldest brother had a son eighteen years old, and I had two stout boys of my own. These would have been of great assistance at such times, in using the sweeps, as well as afterward in fishing — but, somehow, although we ran the risk ourselves, we had not the heart to let the young ones get into the danger — for, after all said and done, it was a horrible danger, and that is the truth.

“It is now within a few days of three years since what I am going to tell you occurred. It was on the tenth of July, 18—, a day which the people of this part of the world will never forget — for it was one in which blew the most terrible hurricane that ever came out of the heavens. And yet all the morning, and indeed until late in the afternoon, there was a gentle and steady breeze from the south-west, while the sun shone brightly, so that the oldest seaman among us could not have foreseen what was to follow.

“The three of us — my two brothers and myself — had crossed over to the islands about two o’clock P. M., and soon nearly loaded the smack with fine fish, which, we all remarked, were more plenty that day than we had ever known them. It was just seven, by my watch, when we weighed and started for home, so as to make the worst of the Strom at slack water, which we knew would be at eight.

“We set out with a fresh wind on our starboard quarter, and for some time spanked along at a great rate, never dreaming of danger, for indeed we saw not the slightest reason to apprehend it. All at once we were taken aback by a breeze from over Helseggen. This was most unusual —something that had never happened to us before — and I began to feel a little uneasy, without exactly knowing why. We put the boat on the wind, but could make no headway at all for the eddies, and I was upon the point of proposing to return to the anchorage, when, looking astern, we saw the whole horizon covered with a singular copper-colored cloud that rose with the most amazing velocity.

“In the meantime the breeze that had headed us off fell away, and we were dead becalmed, drifting about in every direction. This state of things, however, did not last long enough to give us time to think about it. In less than a minute the storm was upon us — in less than two the sky was entirely overcast — and what with this and the driving spray, it became suddenly so dark that we could not see each other in the smack.

“Such a hurricane as then blew it is folly to attempt describing. The oldest seaman in Norway never experienced any thing like it. We had let our sails go by the run before it cleverly took us; but, at the first puff, both our masts went by the board if they had been sawed off — the mainmast taking with it my youngest brother, who had lashed himself to it for safety.

“Our boat was the lightest feather of a thing that ever sat upon water. It had a complete flush deck, with only a small hatch near the bow, and this hatch it had always been our custom to batten down when about to cross the Strom, by way of precaution against the chopping seas. But for this circumstance we should have foundered at once — for we lay entirely buried for some moments. How my elder brother escaped destruction I cannot say, for I never had an opportunity of ascertaining. For my part, as soon as I had let the foresail run, I threw myself flat on deck, with my feet against the narrow gunwale of the bow, and with my hands grasping a ring-bolt near the foot of the foremast. It was mere instinct that prompted me to do this —which was undoubtedly the very best thing I could have done — for I was too much flurried to think.

“For some moments we were completely deluged, as I say, and all this time I held my breath, and clung to the bolt. When I could stand it no longer I raised myself upon my knees, still keeping hold with my hands, and thus got my head clear. Presently our little boat gave herself a shake, just as a dog does in coming out of the water, and thus rid herself, in some measure, of the seas. I was now trying to get the better of the stupor that had come over me, and to collect my senses so as to see what was to be done, when I felt somebody grasp my arm. It was my elder brother, and my heart leaped for joy, for I had made sure that he was overboard — but the next moment all this joy was turned into horror — for he put his mouth close to my ear, and screamed out the word ‘Moskoe-strom!’

“No one ever will know what my feelings were at that moment. I shook from head to foot as if I had had the most violent fit of the ague. I knew what he meant by that one word well enough —I knew what he wished to make me understand. With the wind that now drove us on, we were bound for the whirl of the Strom, and nothing could save us!

“You perceive that in crossing the Strom channel, we always went a long way up above the whirl, even in the calmest weather, and then had to wait and watch carefully for the slack — but now we were driving right upon the pool itself, and in such a hurricane as this! ‘To be sure’, I thought, ‘we shall get there just about the slack — is some little hope in that’ — but in the next moment I cursed myself for being so great a fool as to dream of hope at all. I knew very well that we were doomed, had we been ten times a ninety-gun ship.

“By this time the first fury of the tempest had spent itself, or perhaps we did not feel it so much, as we scudded before it, but at all events the seas, which at first had been kept down by the wind, and lay flat and frothing, now got up into absolute mountains. A singular change, too, had come over the heavens. Around in every direction it was still as black as pitch, but nearly overhead there burst out, all at once, a circular rift of clear sky — as clear as I ever saw — and of a deep bright blue — and through it there blazed forth the full moon with a lustre that I never before knew her to wear. She lit up every thing about us with the greatest distinctness — but, oh God, what a scene it was to light up!

“I now made one or two attempts to speak to my brother — but in some manner which I could not understand, the din had so increased that I could not make him hear a single word, although I screamed at the top of my voice in his ear. Presently he shook his head, looking as pale as death, and held up one of his fingers, as to say ‘listen!’

“At first I could not make out what he meant — but soon a hideous thought flashed upon me. I dragged my watch from its fob. It was not going. I glanced as its face by the moonlight, and then burst into tears as I flung it far away into the ocean. It had run down at seven o’clock! We were behind the time of the slack, and the whirl of the Strom was in full fury!

“When a boat is well built, properly trimmed, and not deep laden, the waves in a strong gale, when she is going large, seem always to slip from beneath her — which appears very strange to a landsman — and this is what is called riding, in sea phrase.

“Well, so far we had ridden the swells very cleverly; but presently a gigantic sea happened to take us right under the counter, and bore us with it as it rose — up — up — as if into the sky. I would not have believed that any wave could rise so high. And then down we came with a sweep, a slide, and a plunge, that made me feel sick and dizzy, as if I was falling from some lofty mountain-top in a dream. But while we were up I had thrown a quick glance around — and that one glance was all sufficient. I saw our exact position in an instant. The Moskoe-strom whirlpool was about a quarter of a mile dead ahead — but no more like the every-day Moskoe-strom, than the whirl as you now see it, is like a mill-race. If I had not known where we were, and what we had to expect, I should not have recognized the place at all. As it was, I involuntarily closed my eyes in horror. The lids clenched themselves together as if in a spasm.

“It could not have been more than two minutes afterwards until we suddenly felt the waves subside, and were enveloped in foam. The boat made a sharp half turn to larboard, and then shot off in its new direction like a thunderbolt. At the same moment the roaring noise of the water was completely drowned in a kind of shrill shriek — such a sound as you might imagine given out by the water-pipes of many thousand steam-vessels, letting off their steam all together. We were now in the belt of surf that always surrounds the whirl; and I thought, of course, that another moment would plunge us into the abyss — down which we could only see indistinctly on account of the amazing velocity with which we were borne along. The boat did not seem to sink into the water at all, but to skim like an air-bubble upon the surface of the surge. Her starboard side was next the whirl, and on the larboard arose the world of ocean we had left. It stood like a huge writhing wall between us and the horizon.

“It may appear strange, but now, when we were in the very jaws of the gulf, I felt more composed than when we were only approaching it. Having made up my mind to hope no more, I got rid of a great deal of that terror which unmanned me at first. I suppose it was despair that strung my nerves.

“It may look like boasting — but what I tell you is truth — I began to reflect how magnificent a thing it was to die in such a manner, and how foolish it was in me to think of so paltry a consideration as my own individual life, in view of so wonderful a manifestation of God’s power. I do believe that I blushed with shame when this idea crossed my mind. After a little while I became possessed with the keenest curiosity about the whirl itself. I positively felt a wish to explore its depths, even at the sacrifice I was going to make; and my principal grief was that I should never be able to tell my old companions on shore about the mysteries I should see. These, no doubt, were singular fancies to occupy a man’s mind in such extremity — and I have often thought since, that the revolutions of the boat around the pool might have rendered me a little light-headed.

“There was another circumstance which tended to restore my self-possession; and this was the cessation of the wind, which could not reach us in our present situation — for, as you saw yourself, the belt of surf is considerably lower than the general bed of the ocean, and this latter now towered above us, a high, black, mountainous ridge. If you have never been at sea in a heavy gale, you can form no idea of the confusion of mind occasioned by the wind and the spray together. They blind, deafen and strangle you, and take away all power of action or reflection. But we were now, in a great measure, rid of these annoyances — just as death-condemned felons in prison are allowed petty indulgences, forbidden them while their doom is yet uncertain.

“How often we made the circuit of the belt it is impossible to say. We careered round and round for perhaps an hour, flying rather than floating, getting gradually more and more into the middle of the surge, and then nearer and nearer to its horrible inner edge. All this time I had never let go of the ring-bolt. My brother was at the stern, holding on to a large empty water-cask which had been securely lashed under the coop of the counter, and was the only thing on deck that had not been swept overboard when the gale first took us. As we approached the brink of the pit he let go his hold upon this, and made for the ring, from which, in the agony of his terror, he endeavored to force my hands, as it was not large enough to afford us both a secure grasp. I never felt deeper grief than when I saw him attempt this act — although I knew he was a madman when he did it — a raving maniac through sheer fright. I did not care, however, to contest the point with him. I thought it could make no difference whether either of us held on at all; so I let him have the bolt, and went astern to the cask. This there was no great difficulty in doing; for the smack flew round steadily enough, and upon an even keel — only swaying to and fro, with the immense sweeps and swelters of the whirl. Scarcely had I secured myself in my new position, when we gave a wild lurch to starboard, and rushed headlong into the abyss. I muttered a hurried prayer to God, and thought all was over.

“As I felt the sickening sweep of the descent, I had instinctively tightened my hold upon the barrel, and closed my eyes. For some seconds I dared not open them — while I expected instant destruction, and wondered that I was not already in my death-struggles with the water. But moment after moment elapsed. I still lived. The sense of falling had ceased; and the motion of the vessel seemed much as it had been before while in the belt of foam, with the exception that she now lay more along. I took courage and looked once again upon the scene.

“Never shall I forget the sensations of awe, horror, and admiration with which I gazed about me. The boat appeared to be hanging, as if by magic, midway down, upon the interior surface of a funnel vast in circumference, prodigious in depth, and whose perfectly smooth sides might have been mistaken for ebony, but for the bewildering rapidity with which they spun around, and for the gleaming and ghastly radiance they shot forth, as the rays of the full moon, from that circular rift amid the clouds which I have already described, streamed in a flood of golden glory along the black walls, and far away down into the inmost recesses of the abyss.

“At first I was too much confused to observe anything accurately. The general burst of terrific grandeur was all that I beheld. When I recovered myself a little, however, my gaze fell instinctively downward. In this direction I was able to obtain an unobstructed view, from the manner in which the smack hung on the inclined surface of the pool. She was quite upon an even keel — that is to say, her deck lay in a plane parallel with that of the water — but this latter sloped at an angle of more than forty-five degrees, so that we seemed to be lying upon our beam-ends. I could not help observing, nevertheless, that I had scarcely more difficulty in maintaining my hold and footing in this situation, than if we had been upon a dead level; and this, I suppose, was owing to the speed at which we revolved.

“The rays of the moon seemed to search the very bottom of the profound gulf; but still I could make out nothing distinctly, on account of a thick mist in which everything there was enveloped, and over which there hung a magnificent rainbow, like that narrow and tottering bridge which Mussulmen say is the only pathway between Time and Eternity. This mist, or spray, was no doubt occasioned by the clashing of the great walls of the funnel, as they all met together at the bottom — but the yell that went up to the Heavens from out of mist, I dare not attempt to describe.

“Our first slide into the abyss itself, from the belt of foam above, had carried us to a great distance down the slope; but our farther descent was by no means proportionate. Round and round we swept — not with any uniform movement — but in dizzying swings and jerks, that sent us sometimes only a few hundred feet — sometimes nearly the complete circuit of the whirl. Our progress downward, at each revolution, was slow, but very perceptible.

“Looking about me upon the wide waste of liquid ebony on which we were thus borne, I perceived that our boat was not the only object in the embrace of the whirl. Both above and below us were visible fragments of vessels, large masses of building timber and trunks of trees, with many smaller articles, such as pieces of house furniture, broken boxes, barrels and staves. I have already described the unnatural curiosity which had taken the place of my original terrors. It appeared to grow upon me as I drew nearer and nearer to my dreadful doom. I now began to watch, with a strange interest, the numerous things that floated in our company. I must have been delirious — for I even sought amusement in speculating upon the relative velocities of their several descents toward the foam below. ‘This fir tree’, I found myself at one time saying, ‘will certainly be the next thing that takes the awful plunge and disappears’ — and then I was disappointed to find that the wreck of a Dutch merchant ship overtook it and went down before. At length, after making several guesses of this nature, and being deceived in all —this fact — the fact of my invariable miscalculation, set me upon a train of reflection that made my limbs again tremble, and my heart beat heavily once more.

“It was not a new terror that thus affected me, but the dawn of a more exciting hope. This hope arose partly from memory, and partly from present observation. I called to mind the great variety of buoyant matter that strewed the coast of Lofoden, having been absorbed and then thrown forth by the Moskoe-strom. By far the greater number of the articles were shattered in the most extraordinary way — so chafed and roughened as to have the appearance of being stuck full of splinters — but then I distinctly recollected that there were some of them which were not disfigured at all. Now I could not account for this difference except by supposing that the roughened fragments were the only ones which had been completely absorbed — that the others had entered the whirl at so late a period of the tide, or, from some reason, had descended so slowly after entering, that they did not reach the bottom before the turn of the flood came, or of the ebb, as the case might be. I conceived it possible, in either instance, that they might thus be whirled up again to the level of the ocean, without undergoing the fate of those which had been drawn in more early or absorbed more rapidly. I made, also, three important observations. The first was, that as a general rule, the larger the bodies were, the more rapid their descent; — the second, that, between two masses of equal extent, the one spherical, and the other of any other shape, the superiority in speed of descent was with the sphere; — the third, that, between two masses of equal size, the one cylindrical, and the other of any other shape, the cylinder was absorbed the more slowly.

“Since my escape, I have had several conversations on this subject with an old school-master of the district; and it was from him that I learned the use of the words ‘cylinder’ and ‘sphere.’ He explained to me — although I have forgotten the explanation — how what I observed was, in fact, the natural consequence of the forms of the floating fragments — and showed me how it happened that a cylinder, swimming in a vortex, offered more resistance to its suction, and was drawn in with greater difficulty than an equally bulky body, of any form whatever.1

“There was one startling circumstance which went a great way in enforcing these observations, and rendering me anxious to turn them to account, and this was that, at every revolution, we passed something like a barrel, or else the broken yard or the mast of a vessel, while many of these things, which had been on our level when I first opened my eyes upon the wonders of the whirlpool, were now high up above us, and seemed to have moved but little from their original station.

“I no longer hesitated what to do. I resolved to lash myself securely to the water cask upon which I now held, to cut it loose from the counter, and to throw myself with it into the water. I attracted my brother’s attention by signs, pointed to the floating barrels that came near us, and did everything in my power to make him understand what I was about to do. I thought at length that he comprehended my design — but, whether this was the case or not, he shook his head despairingly, and refused to move from his station by the ring-bolt. It was impossible to force him; the emergency admitted no delay; and so, with a bitter struggle, I resigned him to his fate, fastened myself to the cask by means of the lashings which secured it to the counter, and precipitated myself with it into the sea, without another moment’s hesitation.

“The result was precisely what I had hoped it might be. As it is myself who now tell you this tale — as you see that I did escape — and as you are already in possession of the mode in which this escape was effected, and must therefore anticipate all that I have farther to say — I will bring my story quickly to conclusion. It might have been an hour, or thereabout, after my quitting the smack, when, having descended to a vast distance beneath me, it made three or four wild gyrations in rapid succession, and, bearing my loved brother with it, plunged headlong, at once and forever, into the chaos of foam below. The barrel to which I was attached sunk very little farther than half the distance between the bottom of the gulf and the spot at which I leaped overboard, before a great change took place in the character of the whirlpool. The slope of the sides of the vast funnel became momently less and less steep. The gyrations of the whirl grew, gradually, less and less violent. By degrees, the froth and the rainbow disappeared, and the bottom of the gulf seemed slowly to uprise. The sky was clear, the winds had gone down, and the full moon was setting radiantly in the west, when I found myself on the surface of the ocean, in full view of the shores of Lofoden, and above the spot where the pool of the Moskoe-strom had been. It was the hour of the slack — but the sea still heaved in mountainous waves from the effects of the hurricane. I was borne violently into the channel of the Strom and in a few minutes, was hurried down the coast into the ‘grounds’ of the fishermen. A boat picked me up — exhausted from fatigue — and (now that the danger was removed) speechless from the memory of its horror. Those who drew me on board were my old mates and dally companions — but they knew me no more than they would have known a traveller from the spirit-land. My hair, which had been raven-black the day before, was as white as you see it now. They say too that the whole expression of my countenance had changed. I told them my story — they did not believe it. I now tell it to you — and I can scarcely expect you to put more faith in it than did the merry fishermen of Lofoden.

  1. Poe provides a footnote to “Archimedes, De Incidentibus in Fluido.  While Archimedes apparently did write on whirlpools in ‘De Incidentibus in Humido‘, Poe seems to have found his spurious authority in Sketch of the Progress of Physical Science by Thomas Thomson  (1843), in which De Incidentibus in Fluido appears — in time for the second edition of Descent in 1845.

Vortex atoms in 19th century physics

In 1914 Wyndham Lewis announced the vortex of art in Blast:

Long live the great art vortex sprung up in the centre of this town! (‘Long Live the Vortex!’, Blast 1, 1914)

With our Vortex the Present is the only active thing.
Life is the Past and the Future.
The Present is Art
Our Vortex insists on water-tight compartments.
There is no Present — there is Past and Future, and there is Art.

This is a great Vorticist age, a great still age of artists.

Our Vortex is proud of its polished sides.
Our Vortex will not hear of anything but its disastrous polished dance.
Our Vortex desires the immobile rhythm of its swiftness.
Our Vortex rushes out like an angry dog at your Impressionistic fuss.
Our Vortex is white and abstract with its red-hot swiftness.1 (‘Our Vortex’, Blast 2, 1915)

Long before this, starting in the 1860s and continuing in vogue until almost the end of the century, the vortex had been proposed in physics as nothing less than the elementary structure of the atom. Here is the great figure of William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), in a presentation to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1867:

After noticing Helmholtz’s admirable discovery of the law of vortex motion in a perfect liquid — that is, in a fluid perfectly destitute of viscosity (or fluid friction) — the author [Kelvin] said that this discovery inevitably suggests the idea that Helmholtz’s rings are the only true atoms. For the only pretext seeming to justify the monstrous assumption of infinitely strong and infinitely rigid pieces of matter, the existence of which is asserted as a probable hypothesis by some of the greatest modern chemists (…) [—] urged by Lucretius and adopted by Newton — [is] that it seems necessary to account for the unalterable distinguishing qualities of different kinds of matter. But Helmholtz has provided an absolutely unalterable quality in the motion of any portion of a perfect liquid in which the peculiar motion which he calls “Wirbelbewegung” has been once created. Thus any portion of a perfect liquid which has “Wirbelbewegung” has one recommendation of Lucretius’s atoms — infinitely perennial specific quality. To generate or to destroy “Wirbelbewegung” in a perfect fluid can only be an act of creative power. Lucretius’s atom does not explain any of the properties of matter without attributing them to the atom itself. Thus the “clash of atoms,” as it has been well called, has been invoked by his modern followers to account for the elasticity of gases. Every other property of matter has similarly required an assumption of specific forces pertaining to the atom. [But] it is [as] easy (…) to assume whatever specific forces may be required in any portion of matter which possesses the “Wirbelbewegung” as in a solid indivisible piece of matter; and hence the Lucretius atom has no prima facie advantage over the Helmholtz atom.

The vortex was, however, not only no less plausible than “a solid indivisible piece of matter” as “the true atom”. It also had the inestimable advantage, as Helmholtz had shown in regard to the vortex in a perfect liquid, that it had definable structure and was subject to mathematical specification. This meant that investigations could relate empirical findings to transformations of the hypothetical structure and to mathematical calculations in a way that could not be done taking atoms as solid lumps.

Furthermore, as Kelvin pointed out in his talk, the vortex atom theory seemed closely related to contemporary research into electricity and magnetism.  Indeed, Kelvin predicted in his presentation: “the velocities [of the vortex circles] at different points are to be in proportion to the intensities of the magnetic forces in the corresponding points of the magnetic field”.

Hence, although the vortex theory ultimately proved untenable, its focus on specifiable structure and mathematical modeling contributed mightily to the nobel prize winning discovery of the electron in 1897 by  J.J. Thomson and to the associated gradual understanding of the true structure of the atom.  In fact, J.J. Thomson’s earlier Treatise on the Motion of Vortex Rings (1884), had had no other goal than to describe the motions of Kelvin’s vortex atoms.

Now McLuhan took the vortex as the atomic structure of media and saw Poe’s Maelstrom as describing the peculiar difference between material and media atoms. Namely, media atoms have a kind of rider2 (like Poe’s mariner) who can detach from one medium in order to ride another — in Kelvin’s terms, “an act of creative power”? — but can also become so attached to a medium, like the mariner’s brother, that no alternative is available but to continue to ride it to certain doom.  (Such a rider apparently cannot dare to go “through the vanishing point” which is the only way between atomic media structures.) ‘Riding’ and ‘detaching’ and ‘reattaching’ in these ways are, McLuhan suggested, what it means to be a human being and are therefore central to its investigation.3 

Just before entering the maelstrom, Poe’s mariner experiences in anticipation what will take place there:

When a boat is well built, properly trimmed, and not deep laden, the waves in a strong gale, when she is going large, seem always to slip from beneath her — which appears very strange to a landsman — and this is what is called riding, in sea phrase. Well, so far we had ridden the swells very cleverly; but presently a gigantic sea happened to take us right under the [ship’s stern or] counter, and bore us with it as it rose — up — up — as if into the sky. I would not have believed that any wave could rise so high. And then down we came with a sweep, a slide, and a plunge, that made me feel sick and dizzy, as if I was falling from some lofty mountain-top in a dream.

The great questions are: what does it mean that humans are riders of forms?  and that these riders are somehow able to undertake (or undergo?) the radical change from one form to another?

The boat did not seem to sink into the water at all, but to skim like an air-bubble upon the surface of the surge.4

As he noted in his 1867 presentation to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Kelvin’s inspiration for his vortex atom theory came from Hermann von Helmholtz‘s 1858 paper: ‘Über Integrale der hydrodynamischen Gleichungen, welche den Wirbelbewegungen  entsprechen’. Kelvin’s friend and colleague, P.G. Tait, mentioned Helmholtz’s paper in a letter to Kelvin in 1862 and then in 1867 translated it as ‘On Integrals of the Hydrodynamical Equations, Which Express Vortex-motion’.  Between these two events, Kelvin and Tait developed ways of illustrating the workings of vortex motion using smoke rings and Helmholtz himself visited them in Glasgow from Germany in 1863.

Poe’s Descent into the Maelstrom, which was originally published in 1841, and would become McLuhan’s continuing inspiration in 1946, became available in German translation starting in 1846.5 Strangely, it is therefore possible that Poe’s story played central roles, 100 years apart, in unexpected  developments of the physical sciences in the 19th century and of the human sciences in the 20th.6

In the first instance, it may have had some part in suggesting the study of ‘Wirbelbewegungen’ to Helmholtz, which led to Kelvin’s vortex atoms and eventually to J.J. Thomson’s electrons. And in the second, it certainly had a part in suggesting to McLuhan how a Gestalt-switch in media is central to all human experience and communication.

Meanwhile, halfway between these events, Lewis and Pound proclaimed vorticism in art.

  1. Lewis seems to have taken his description of the vortex here in part from Poe’s ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom: “Never shall I forget the sensations of awe, horror, and admiration with which I gazed about me. The boat appeared to be hanging, as if by magic, midway down, upon the interior surface of a funnel vast in circumference, prodigious in depth, and whose perfectly smooth sides might have been mistaken for ebony, but for the bewildering rapidity with which they spun around, and for the gleaming and ghastly radiance they shot forth, as the rays of the full moon (…) streamed in a flood of golden glory along the black walls, and far away down into the inmost recesses of the abyss.”
  2. See McLuhan’s ‘The Implications of Cultural Uniformity’ (in Superculture: American Popular Culture and Europe1975): “William Empson has described the role of the semiconscious navigator between worlds, in his ‘Arachne’ (1928) which opens: “Twixt devil and deep sea, man hacks his caves; / Birth, death; one, many; what is true, and seems; /
    Earth’s vast hot iron, cold space’s empty waves.”
  3. Every human being comes to life in the medium of amniotic fluid (Cameron’s fluid) and is then born into the very different medium of the extra-uterine world.  The in-fant then learns to speak in another global Gestalt-switch whereby it leaves a world of instinctual communication and somehow comes to understand another sort of general communication based on sounds that can carry meaning to it and from it. Now understanding modern art, according to McLuhan, requires an analogous intro-duction or e-ducation into new learning: since late in the nineteenth century, artists, poets and musicians have been attempting to express insight into forms, or media, not content, or messages. As he wrote to Pound (July 16, 1952): “Your own tips are always exact. But they are of little help to the uninitiated. Once a man has got onto technique as the key in communication it’s different. But somehow the bugbear of content forbids that anybody be interested in technique as content” (Letters 231). McLuhan’s wider claim followed: the key to the investigation of human being, therefore to the survival of the species, depended on study of “the life and nature of forms” (‘Introduction’ to Innis’ The Bias of Communication, 1964).
  4. Empson’s ‘Arachne’: “His gleaming bubble between void and void, / Tribe-membrane, that by mutual tension stands, / Earth’s surface film”…
  5. As specified at The Edgar Allan Poe Society website, between 1846 and 1858, when Helmholtz’s ‘Wirbelbewegungen’ paper appeared, Poe’s Maelstrom was translated into German at least 3 separate times: ‘Auf dem Maelstrom: Reiseerinnerungen aus Norwegen’, Frankfurter Konversationsblatt, Oktober 1846; ‘Der Mahlstrom’, Bremischer Beobachter, April 1852; ‘Eine Hinabwirbelung in den Maalstrom’, Deutsche Monatshefte, Dezember 1855.
  6. “In the 20th” — as may perhaps be realized in the 21st!

Giedion on simultaneity

In the middle of a consideration of space in Space, Time and Architecture, Giedion suddenly broaches the topic of time:

Cubism breaks with Renaissance perspective. It views objects relatively: that is, from several points of view, no one of which has exclusive authority. And in so dissecting objects it sees them simultaneously from all sides — from above and below, from inside and outside. It goes around and into its objects. Thus, to the three dimensions of the Renaissance which have held good as constituent facts throughout so many centuries, there is added a fourth one — time. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was the first to recognize and express this change, around 1911. The same year saw the first cubist exhibition in the Salon des Indépendants. Considering the history of the principles from which they broke, it can well be understood that the paintings should have been thought a menace to the public peace, and have become the subject of remarks in the Chamber of Deputies.
The presentation of objects from several points of view introduces a principle which is intimately bound up with modern life — simultaneity. It is a historical coincidence1 that Einstein should have begun his famous work, Elektrodynamik bewegter Korper, in 1905 with a careful definition of simultaneity.2 (First edition, 1941, 357; fifth edition, 1966, 436.)

As seen in this passage from STA, Giedion evidently considered Apollinaire a key figure. In fact, shortly after first meeting McLuhan in St Louis. Giedion recommended Apollinaire to him in a note from August 14, 1943:

Did you ever study the Alcools [1913] of Guillaume Apollinaire?

This, along with his on-going work on Eliot and on Poe (who was first translated into French by Baudelaire), suggested to McLuhan the need for a close study of French symbolist poetry (especially Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé) that would occupy him for the next decade (not without a mass of other interests, of course). The result was an unpublished manuscript in the McLuhan papers in Ottawa discussing Eliot’s encounter with the symbolists that is full of citations in French from them: Prelude to Prufrock.

The central importance of this study for McLuhan’s literary essays and especially for his media work may be seen in a passage from his letter to Innis from March 14, 1951:

One major discovery of the symbolists which had the greatest importance for subsequent investigation was their notion of the learning process as a labyrinth of the senses and faculties whose retracing provided the key to all arts and sciences…

  1. ‘Historical coincidence’ has been substituted for ‘temporal coincidence’ here since ‘the temporal’ in this context is exactly not, or not only, ‘the historical’. While it is not impossible that Giedion intended the full significance of ‘the temporal’ here, that is, ‘the historical’ + simultaneity, the likelihood is that his expression here is an artifact of the translation of STA by Giedion and his aides from his German thinking to English-like writing. His late work would greatly benefit from Jackie Tyrwhitt’s emergence as his editor.
  2. English translation: ‘On the electrodynamics of moving bodies‘.

Giedion to Nef: “a young scholar of English literature”

On August 3, 1943, Sigfried Giedion wrote his friend John Nef at the University of Chicago (where Nef was the foremost of the founders of the Committee on Social Thought 1 and a close aide to UC President Robert Hutchins) about his meeting with a promising young scholar in St Louis: Mr H.M. McLuhan. Giedion in his somewhat stilted English wrote as follows:

One evening at St Louis I met a young scholar of English literature, Mr H M McLuhan.  I had an excellent impression of this young man who seems to live rather isolated at St Louis University. I heard that he made the PhD at Cambridge (England) and that he became there a catholic (as for instance also T.S. Eliot).  I did not read any of his articles, but I shall ask him to send me some fragments of his book on English literature, and when they are all right, I shall try and do my best that they will be published by a good publisher. Perhaps Chicago University may invite him once2 for a lecture. (…) I guess, Mr McLuhan would fit into the Chicago environment and I did not find many youngsters of his kind of approach.

The oral recollections of Giedion by Eduard Sekler are interesting in this context:

When I read Space, Time and Architecture at that time it was a revelation. I wrote a glowing review about it. I understand why, for a while, in every architecture school in this country, that was the book that was lying on the drafting board. Giedion was also a fascinating figure personally, and you could learn from him to have a scent for where the new was that was worth pursuing. He had this intuition that was admirable.3 

  1. The Committee is now named after him as the John U Nef Committee on Social Thought.
  2. ‘Once’: presumably Giedion was thinking of German ‘einmal’, which can mean ‘once’, but here should have been ‘sometime’. Eduard Sekler recalled: “I was among the few people who could follow his (Giedion’s) lectures because I could hear the German under his English”. See the next note for the reference.
  3. Spirit and project : Eduard F. Sekler, Getty Center Art History Oral Documentation Project, 1995.

Speaking of Winnipeg – “a vast sense of space and time”

In a 1970 interview of McLuhan and Tom Easterbrook by Danny Finkleman1, McLuhan recalled many different aspects of his life in Winnipeg (often with tongue in cheek):

We might as well have a few words about the superiority of the prairie meadowlark to all other songbirds (…) it has a much longer and almost melodic phrase. It isn’t a mere chirp; it has a melody. It talks to you. Besides it is extremely musical. It’s not just the solid glug-glug of the nightingale [championed by uninformed ornithologists like John Keats]. By comparison with the birds I’ve heard in Europe and England, it is enormously superior. (23)

I think of western skies as one of the most beautiful things about the West, and the western horizons. The westerner doesn’t have a point of view. He has a vast panorama; he has such tremendous space around him (…) a total field of vision,  and since he can take this total field at any time, he doesn’t have to worry about goals. He can take his time (…) You have a vast sense of space and time.  (23-24)

I lived on Gertrude Avenue [in the Fort Rouge section of Winnipeg] and there was the Assiniboine River at one end of the street, a few hundred yards away; at the other end, was the Red River.  I had a boat on each river, a rowboat on the Assiniboine (where I skied in winter) and a sailboat on the Red. (32)

Tom and I both started off [university] in Engineering [in the fall of 1928] and because of our long periods of study during the summer [when jobs were not available on account of the depression], we were able to upgrade ourselves into Arts. I read myself out of Engineering by my long summer [of 1929]. (27)

I walked to school many times in 50-below zero along Osborne Street [over the Assiniboine River via the Osborne Street bridge] across from the Parliament grounds to the old quondset huts that used to be called Manitoba University. (27-28)

We [Easterbrook and McLuhan] had an absolute agreement between ourselves to disagree about everything and this kept up (…) a very hot dialogue [between us] from morning to night for years in Winnipeg which carried us on foot across town at night, late at night till three or four in the morning, back and forth across the city. [McLuhan’s family lived south of downtown, Easterbrook’s north.] (34)

He’s been stubborn always. [Easterbrook on McLuhan] (34)

Tom and I went to Europe [in 1932] during the Depression on our own. (…) We used youth hostels. From portal to portal we spent one hundred dollars in three months and supported ourselves very happily all that period. It was the sort of trip you couldn’t have today.  You couldn’t ride bicycles on the roads we travelled on because of the congestion of traffic in England now. So it was a pastoral event and a fulfillment of a great ideal.  (26)

One peculiar thing happened when Tom and I were travelling in England. We had to decide as we came south on our bike route whether to go to Cambridge or bypass it for London. And we said, No, we’ll go to Cambridge later; we’ll study there. And both of us did. We ducked Cambridge on our tour and went back there to study. He went to Jesus College [as a professor in 1955-1956], I went to Trinity Hall [as a student in 1934-1936]. (36-37)

How fortunate we were [in Winnipeg] in receiving people from every part of United States. Manitoba University, in our time, had great figures from United States and Great Britain (…) like Rupert Clendon Lodge2… (30)

I applied to Wisconsin University for my first job in 1936 in the depth of the Depression and got it. I applied to Wisconsin University because of Lloyd Wheeler3, who was the only [professor] I knew [in the English department] at Manitoba who had been to an American university. I wrote to his alma mater using his name and got the job. (36)

  1. Speaking of Winnipeg, ed John Parr, 1974, 23-38
  2. See note 3 below.
  3. McLuhan to E.K Brown, new head of the UM English Department, December 12, 1935: “I wish merely to introduce myself as one of the products of some of the leanest years of the Manitoba English Department. The last year was somewhat relieved by the presence of Dr. Wheeler, but I had directed my energies to philosophy, and did my best work for Professor Lodge.” (Letters 79)

McLuhan and Beckett: Through the vanishing point by way of neither

Managing The Ascent from the Maelstrom [McLuhan’s ‘odos ano kato play on Poe’s The Descent into the Maelstrom] today demands awareness that can be achieved only by going Through the Vanishing Point. (McLuhan)1

I want to bring poetry into drama, a poetry which has been through the void (das Nichts durchschritten hat) and makes a new start in a new space. I think in new dimensions and basically [im Grunde] am not very concerned whether someone can follow me in this. (Beckett)2

McLuhan is reported to have detested Beckett.3 But this is almost certainly a misunderstanding due to McLuhan presenting his thought in different ways depending on his audience, his mood, the particular topic he was developing, and so on. This is no different from anybody else, of course, but with McLuhan the danger of such oversimplified misunderstanding was acute on account of the unique multiplicity of his thought, combined with his equally unique unconcern with precise formulation. It may be guessed that he knew how little ‘precise formulation’ had achieved in the past and wanted to see what ‘imprecise formulation’ could do. Hence his attachment to probes and to the mining of ignorance.

In fact, as the above citations illustrate, the central preoccupation of both McLuhan and Beckett was ‘the same’ — what might be termed ‘mapping the unmappable’, speaking the “unspeakable”. 

Formulated in McLuhan’s terms, as soon as the essential plurality of media is admitted4, the question emerges: what lies between media such that they may be differentiated? how is this between navigated? where and when does this take place? who is involved? above all, why does this take place? on what strange basis? and what does this “flip” through “the vanishing point” between media have to do with human being and with its history, society and culture?

Over and over again, for more than 30 years from 1946 to 1980, this drama of metamorphosis that takes place in the “interior landscape” was described by McLuhan in terms of the mariner in Poe’s Descent into the Maelstrom. Many of these repeated descriptions have been collected here.  The key point for McLuhan, as he expressed it already in 1946, lay in the mariner’s escape from the whirlpool through detachment, study and reprogramming:

The sailor in his story The Maelstrom is at first paralyzed with horror. But in his very paralysis there is another fascination which emerges, a power of detached observation which becomes a “scientific” interest in the action of the strom. And this provides the means of escape. (Footprints in the Sands of Crime) 

Beckett, too, had been formulating the “quintessence” of his thought since ‘my way is in the sand’ from 1946, the same year as McLuhan’s ‘Footprints in the Sands of Crime’!  In that year Beckett published “Trois poèmes”, one of which, untitled, reads in his own translation:

my way is in the sand flowing
between the shingle and the dune
the summer rain rains on my life
on me my life harrying fleeing
to its beginning to its end

my peace is there in the receding mist
when I may cease from treading these long shifting thresholds
and live the space of a door
that opens and shuts5

Twenty years later, his 1966 ‘Pour Avigdor Arikha’ continued the effort of quintessential refinement (again in his own translation):

Siege laid again to the impregnable without. Eye and hand feverishly after the unself. By the hand it unceasingly changes the eye unceasingly changed. Back and forth the gaze beating against unseeable and unmakable. Truce for a space and the marks of what it is to be and be in face of. These deep marks to show.6

A decade later again, in 1976, when the composer Morton Feldman specifically asked him for “the quintessence” of his work7, Beckett gave him this:

TO AND FRO in shadow from inner to outer shadow
from impenetrable self to impenetrable nonself by way of neither
as between two lit refuges whose doors once neared gently close,
once turned away from gently part again
beckoned back and forth and turned away
heedless of the way, intent on the one gleam or the other
unheard footfalls only sound
till at last halt for good, absent for good from self and other
then no sound
then gently light unfading on that unheeded neither
unspeakable home 8

 This “way of neither” goes “through the vanishing point”. It is “the medium [that] is the message”.

 

  1. Take Today, 13.
  2. Samuel Beckett speaking to gymnasium students in Germany in February 1961.  Modified translation from Knowlson’s bio of Beckett, Damned to Fame, 427.  Original: “Ich will Poesie in das Drama bringen, eine Poesie, die das Nichts durchschritten hat und in einem neuen Raum einen neuen Anfang findet. Ich denke in neuen Dimensionen, und im Grunde kümmert es mich wenig, wer mir dabei folgen kann.” (Spectaculum 6, 1963, 319)
  3. See, eg, Marchand 106.
  4. McLuhan held that the essence of human being lies in language use. But every human begins as life as an in-fant, aka a non-speaker. A flip is required between the medium of in-fancy to that of speech. It therefore belongs to the very essence of human beings that media are plural.
  5. The French original: “je suis ce cours de sable qui glisse/entre le galet et la dune/la pluie d’eté pleut sur ma vie/sur moi ma vie qui me fuit me poursuit/et finira le jour de son commencement//cher instant je te vois/dans ce rideau de brume qui recule/où je n’aurai plus à fouler ces longs seuils mouvants/et vivrai le temps d’une porte qui s’ouvre et se referme”
  6. Disjecta, 152. The French original: “Siège remis devant le dehors imprenable. Fièvre oeilmain dans la soif du nonsoi. Oeil par la main sans cesse changé à l’instant même ou sans cesse il la change. Regard ne s’arrachant à l’invisible que pour s’asséner sur l’infaisable et retour éclair. Trêve à la navette et traces de ce que c’est que d’être et d’être devant. Traces profondes.”
  7. Knowlson, Damned to Fame: “I (Feldman) said that I was looking for the quintessence, something that just hovered.” (557). Beckett himself is recorded as observing to Martin Esslin, “I take away all the accidentals because I want to come down to the bedrock of the essentials, the archetypal.” (Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett, ed James and Elizabeth Knowlson, 2006, 47-48)
  8.  “Neither’, Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, ed S E Gontarski, 1996. The original draft (which Beckett wrote for Feldman in the middle of their conversation and later slightly altered) began: “To and fro in shadow, from outer shadow to inner shadow. To and fro, between unattainable self and unattainable non-self.” (Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 557) Although written out in the form of a poem, and although having a clear relation to the poem ‘my way is in the sand’, Beckett insisted that ‘Neither’ was prose, not poetry. This may have been a pointer to ‘Pour Avigdor Arikha’.

Autobiography – beginning to teach in 1936

In 1960, McLuhan looked back a quarter century to his first years teaching at the University of Wisconsin (1936-1937) and St Louis University (1937-1944):

When I began to teach Freshman rhetoric in 1936 the “new criticism” had not yet begun to be current in colleges. Nor had there yet begun that full study of ancient rhetoric as a means of understanding Renaissance literature. Moreover, the application of anthropological method to the appreciation of the multi-levelled riches of popular culture had not yet come into vogue. From the first, I used all three of these approaches to freshman English, and further, found the Basic English of Ogden and Richards a wonderful aid. To these I would add to-day an introduction to the “languages” of the various media of writing,  typing, print, photography, film, radio, and television. For these tongues of the media, whether touched with mechanism or electronic fire, serve to reshape the patterns of discourse, and constitute a large portion of our “meaning.” What is shared by the “new criticism,” by traditional rhetoric, popular culture, and by study of the languages and grammars of the media, is the habit of reading and writing in depth. Depth analysis ended with printing and has returned in the past century, which may become known as the electric or electronic age. Multi-levelled exegesis of Ovid or Virgil or the Scriptures was not only a medieval mode of reading and writing. It preceded Christianity and was the norm among ancient “grammarians.” To-day it is again the norm in physics, in psychology, in poetry and the arts. (‘Grammars for the Newer Media’, Communication in General Education, ed Frances Shoemaker and Louis Forsdale, 17-27, 1960)

Preface to Eric Havelock and the Toronto School

Harold Innis and Eric Havelock taught at the University of Toronto together for almost twenty years. Innis came to Toronto in 1920 and remained until his death in 1952.  Havelock joined the faculty in 1929 and left for Harvard in 1947.

Marshall McLuhan taught at Toronto from 1946 until 1979.  Innis and he were colleagues for six years, bound together by Tom Easterbrook who was a longtime crony of McLuhan from Winnipeg (they toured England with one another as university students in 1932) and who was a close associate, almost an assistant, to Innis in the UT Political Economy department.

Innis and Havelock knew each other personally from 1930 at the latest and influenced each other profoundly over the following decades. McLuhan met Innis through Easterbrook in 1948 (if not already in 1947).  It is unclear when he first met Havelock, but presumably sometime in the 1950s. McLuhan, in turn, was profoundly influenced by both Innis and Havelock. The three together are rightly considered as forming a ‘Toronto school of communications’.

The chapters which follow are posts from the blog: McLuhan’s New Sciences (http://mcluhansnewsciences.com/).  Each considers some aspect or aspects of the relations between Innis, Havelock and McLuhan.  Often the instigation is taken from research claims which have all too often ignored the plain facts of the matter. In particular, researchers have unaccountably failed to look into Havelock’s early writings1 from Toronto and have therefore not seen when and how he contributed, mightily, to the ‘Toronto school’.

The research of all three turned on deep questions of epistemology and ontology. Now that all three are coming back into fashion as communication theorists, particularly Innis and McLuhan, perhaps to be joined soon by the early Havelock, it is time to consider just how they related to each other and what their objects were in doing so.  

Eric Havelock and the Toronto School is the first volume to be published by NorthWest Passage Press. The press will concentrate on Canadian intellectual history and will include volumes of original texts, some now out of print, some never published at all.  Its motivation, taken from Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, is that the margin generates insights which the centre does not — but which, for its own stability, it needs to acknowledge. By according with such marginal insights and reorienting itself through them, the centre is able to regain its balance and prevent an uncontrollable destabilization that is otherwise inevitable.

 

Santa Ana, April 6, 2017

  1. Most of Havelock’s early writings from his time in Canada are now difficult to access or even to find at all. NorthWest Passage Press will issue a volume of them later in 2017.

Innis, McLuhan and “the “power of metamorphosis”

There does not exist, nor will there ever exist, any treatise of mine dealing with this subject. For it does not at all admit of theoretical expression like other studies, but, as a result of continued application to the subject itself and communion about it, it is brought to birth in the soul on a sudden, as light that is kindled by a leaping spark, and thereafter it nourishes itself. (Plato, Seventh Letter, 341c-d)1 

The words spoken by the muzhik had the effect of an electric spark in his soul, suddenly transforming and uniting into one the whole swarm of disjointed, impotent, separate thoughts which had never ceased to occupy him. (…) He felt something new in his soul and delightedly probed this new thing, not yet knowing what it was (…) “And suddenly (…) I understand him from a hint!” (Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

My aversion to publishing anything has not been due to want of interest in others but to the thought that after all a philosophy can only be passed from mouth to mouth, where there is opportunity to object & cross-question & that printing is not publishing unless the matter be pretty frivolous.” (C.S. Peirce to Lady Welby, letter of December 2, 1904)

The soul (…) has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. (Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

The printing press and the radio address the world instead of the individual. Their dialectic is overwhelmingly significant to subjects whose subject matter is human action and feeling and is important in the discovery of new truth, but is of very little value in disseminating it. (Innis, A Critical Review)2

By the middle 1930’s, if not earlier, Harold Innis had become highly suspicious of information packaging in modern media like newspapers and radio, but just as much in academic research — including his own.3 He was clear that all information processing inevitably had an element of self-interest and/or of purchased interest and could sense that this inevitable “bias” would precipitate a crisis of civilization.

Starting sometime later, but by the early 1940s at the latest, he began to look into Eric Havelock’s research on “the use of epic poetry as a technique for inter-generational communication of the ‘cultural baggage’ of a non-literate people”.4 Communication as information packaging in modern society and in pre-classical Greece gave him two historical data points 2500 years apart. It must have occurred to him that further data points could be defined by correlating other communication media with their historical and cultural contexts. In fact, the chapters of Empire and Communications (1950) constitute just such a series of civilization/media data points:

Egypt [and “the shift from dependence on stone to dependence on papyrus”]
Babylonia [and questions of clay, scripts and languages]
The Oral Tradition And Greek Civilization
The Written Tradition And The Roman Empire
Parchment And Paper
Paper And The Printing Press

McLuhan was not alone in pointing out that Innis’ economics research into the pervasive and often surprising effects of staple products on the societies processing and transporting them, and on ‘The Penetrative Powers of the Price System’ (1938), provided models for the investigation of the complex relationships between communications media and their social-cultural-political correlates.

But the extension of his data points over a 5000-year history was intended by Innis to be more than a series of snapshots of communication revolutions. The first two sentences of Empire and Communications read: 

The twentieth century has been notable in the concern with studies of civilizations. Spengler, Toynbee, Kroeber, Sorokin, and others have produced works, designed to throw light on the causes of the rise and decline of civilizations, which have reflected an intense interest in the possible future of our own civilization.

Innis’ object, too, was to address “the possible future of our own civilization”. And his central concern was to investigate whether social science could surmount what he called “the fundamental solipsism of Western civilization”5 and thereby become a sort of gyroscope for use in navigating that future. In investigating the space-time implications of the communication capabilities of civilizations since the beginning of recorded history, the hope was to uncover an indirect way around the problem of “fundamental solipsism” through a kind of social science relativity theory. As Innis wrote as early as 1942! in ‘The Newspaper in Economic Development’:

The concepts of time and space must be made relative and elastic and the attention given by the social scientists to problems of space should be paralleled by attention to problems of time.6

This intention of Innis’ work was noted by McLuhan in his ‘Introduction’ to the 1964 reissue of The Bias of Communication:

Innis taught us how to use the bias of culture and communication as an instrument of research. By directing attention to the bias or distorting power of the dominant imagery and technology of any culture, he showed us how to understand cultures. Many scholars had made us aware of the “difficulty of assessing the quality of a culture of which we are a part — or of assessing the quality of a culture of which we are not a part.” (1327) Innis was perhaps the first to make of this vulnerable fact of all scholarly outlook the prime opportunity for research and discovery.

Also by  Graeme Patterson’ in History and Communications (1990):

Beginning with the late work, however, [Innis] began to write about the relativity , or “bias” of media both in relation to each other and to space and time. In this instance his pattern of thought resembles relativity theory, which he probably took as a model to escape the “mechanical” theory he so disliked and mistrusted. It offered him an escape from determinism. (79)

And by John Watson in his 2007 ‘Introduction’ to Empire and Communications:

What Innis was attempting to do in the social sciences was to develop a grand synthesis akin to the quest to develop a “unified field theory” in post-relativity science. He was attempting to develop and merge a theory of politics or imperialism (drawing largely on the work of classics scholars) with a theory of consciousness (drawing on scholars researching the concept of time and space) and a theory of technology (based on an understanding of the biases of media of communications). In so doing, he hoped to overcome the persistent problem of objectivity in the social sciences and provide a means of escape from the limitations of contemporary worldviews [like those of “Spengler, Toynbee, Kroeber, Sorokin and others”]. Although Innis did not successfully complete this grand synthesis, his work in my opinion does not represent a dead end but a rich scholarly vein that has been abandoned long before it is exhausted. Innis offers an immensely suggestive way forward in a world dominated by “spin”, punditry, and commercialism.

However, Watson was deeply mistaken in suggesting that the need for Innis, or for us after him, was to “successfully complete this grand synthesis” by going all the “way forward” to some supposed end of the lateral “vein” exposed by him.

Innis did not live long enough to come to grips with two suggestions made in this connection by McLuhan in the programmatic letter he wrote to Innis on March 14, 1951 (Letters 220-224).

The first of these was the strange notion that the only “way forward” was a labyrinthine way backward:

One major discovery of the symbolists which had the greatest importance for subsequent investigation was their notion of the learning process as a labyrinth of the senses and faculties whose retracing provided the key to all arts and sciences (…) Retracing becomes in modern historical scholarship the technique of reconstruction.8

Again:

But whereas Machiavelli was concerned with the use of society as raw material for the arts of power, [Wyndham] Lewis reverses the perspective and tries to discern the human shape once more in a vast technological landscape which has been ordered on Machiavellian lines.

In his letter to Innis, McLuhan described this retrograde movement of any medium, by which it establishes the prior social environment required by it in order to begin, as “magical”.9 In a later letter to Wyndham Lewis he characterized this strange action as the “power of metamorphosis” (McLuhan to Wyndham Lewis, December 18, 1954, Letters 245), where the phrase should be read in the first place as a subjective genitive: this is an irrepressible power belonging to metamorphosis.

The second suggestion was that this “magical” backwards step, or “flip”, has in fact already been activated whenever any communication medium is deployed, beginning with “language itself“. And since language defines human beings, differentiating them from all other sorts of beings, this knot in time is always already in operation wherever and whenever humans are at all. Indeed, so essential is it to humans that even their perception (“sensation itself”, “the first stage of apprehension”) cannot occur without it. McLuhan made this point in correspondence with Ezra Pound later in the same year as his letter to Innis:

From Joyce’s Stephen Hero, I gather that he had with the combined aid of Aristotle, Dante and Rimbaud decided that the poetic process was nothing else than the process of cognition. That sensation itself was imitation since the forms of things in our sensations are already in a new matter. Namely a human organ. So that the first stage of apprehension is already poetic. (July 24, 1951, Letters 228-229)

Similarly in another letter to Pound from February 28, 1953:

Art is imitation of the process of apprehension.10

And in his important 1954 lecture, Catholic Humanism and Modern LettersMcLuhan described this “scandal of human cognition” as follows:

As language itself is an infinitely greater work of art than the Iliad or the Aeneid, so is the creative act of ordinary human perception a greater thing and a more intricate process than any devised by philosophers or scientists. The poetic process is a reversal, a retracing of the stages of human cognition. It has and will always be so.11 

In sum, “the first stage of apprehension is already poetic” and “the poetic process is a reversal, a retracing of the stages of human cognition”. It followed that there is no human experience of any sort that does not already enact the backwards flip of media-tion. In the investigation of communication media, therefore, the need was first of all to follow, via “the technique of reconstruction”, what is always already happening on its own in all human experience.

In his letter to Innis McLuhan put this point in the middle of reflections on the cybernetics work at MIT which he saw as being “a dialectical approach born of technology” — that is, a linear method taking only the “way forward“: 

The fallacy in the Deutsch-Wiener approach is its failure to understand the techniques and functions of the traditional arts [ie, “the poetic process [a]s a reversal, a retracing of the stages of human cognition”] as the essential type of all human communication. It is instead a dialectical approach born of technology and quite unable of itself to see beyond or around technology. The Medieval schoolmen ultimately ended up on the same dialectical reef.

Between the lines, McLuhan was suggesting to Innis that his own studies of “the (…) type[s] of human communication”, like those of Karl Deutsch and Norbert Wiener at MIT, might have missed its essence. Innis’ approach, despite its great many virtues, had itself fallen prey at its core, perhaps, to the very “technology” he intended to critique. His research would therefore be subject to the same “dialectical” limitations as those of “the Medieval schoolmen” which culminated in “the fundamental solipsism of Western civilization”. (The irony here, of course, was that Innis had famously been critical of McLuhan’s Catholicism in one of their first encounters and now McLuhan was implying that ‘bad Catholicism’ was actually central to Innis’ own work.)

The point at stake, or knot, might be put in terms of Innis’s ‘Plea for Time’ which was correct, in McLuhan’s estimation, in associating time — or times — with “the human dialogue” and with the correlative need for space-time and eye-ear balance. But Innis missed the essential factor that one of the times implicated in “the human dialogue” was backwards (in the continual readjustments of interlocutors to each other in dialogue, a readjustment that was also operative in the “magic” of communications media) such that the fundamental plurality of time did not lie only in the undoubted complications of “forward” linearity.

But precisely since the plurality of time implicated questions of its “magical” reversal, it also forced the further question of that plurality’s synchronicity or “allatonceness”.12 For otherwise differences in time, regardless of their forward or backward direction, would be ‘one at a time’ and ‘one at a time’ is just what ‘time singular’ is!  If time were fundamentally plural, it followed that it must be plural at once — that is, all at the same time!  In this case, not only did time have different forward and backward horizontal directions, but also different vertical ones (‘odos ano katosuch that plural times could unfold simultaneously as well as progressively and retrogressively.  Time itself, like language for Saussure, was both diachronic AND synchronic. It was, as McLuhan put the point in Through the Vanishing Point  (1968), “multileveled“.13

Investigation of this space-time and media complex, while initiated by Innis, needed to be reoriented, in McLuhan’s judgement, if it were to specify the only way out of the problem that was plaguing that investigation, namely “the fundamental solipsism of Western civilization”. And the key to this reorientation was that it learn how to take up itself the “magical” resetting of space-time(s) which was already fundamental to the operation of media throughout the register of human sentience from perception to cognition. Understanding plural space-times could therefore be restated as “understanding media”, as Innis had shown, not only because each medium was inherently structured by some space-time configuration, but also, as McLuhan added, because media operate precisely and only on the basis of a “magical” resetting of these configurations.

The essence of communication according to McLuhan was the step back14 into its own possibility. So, when a child (or the human species for that matter) first begins to speak, the requirement is that it unexpectedly first find itself in a communicative environment. In his letter to Innis McLuhan called this “participation in a process”. Only so, only with some sudden feel for an already existing social medium (however unconscious this must be in the beginning), could a message ever be sent or received. Even, or especially, the initial message, ontogenetic or phylogenetic, requires the activation of a prior medium through which such a message could first be a message at all

A reworked ‘Plea for Time’ would therefore have to consider how an environment could already be in place before the first message and how it was possible to understand this — then and now. In McLuhan’s 1964 ‘Introduction’ to The Bias of Communication he observed:

One can say of Innis what Bertrand Russell said of Einstein on the first page of his ABC of Relativity (1925): “Many of the new ideas can be expressed in non-mathematical language, but they are none the less difficult on that account. What is demanded is a change in our imaginative picture of the world.”15

The great question is when and where this “change in our imaginative picture of the world” takes place. After the ‘I’ is in place in its accustomed environment?  Or before?  Produced by and through the experiencing subject?  Or productive of the experiencing subject?16

If a child (or the species) in linear fashion simply continued its existing inability to understand language, no message would, of course, ever be sent or received. But this was just the cul-de-sac in which Innis was trapped.  As he baldly put the point in ‘A Plea for Time’: “It is impossible for [the economic historian] to avoid the bias of the period in which he writes”. That is, temporal conditions are both determinative and unbreakable — unbreakable on account of time’s (singular) arrow forward. “The fundamental solipsism of Western civilization” necessarily followed from the suppositions that time is singular and that singular time takes only the “way forward” and that there is no remove from this moving staircase.

Instead, according to McLuhan, a “magical” resetting of identity is always occurring to humans through a flip back in time and space into a new sensed environment — a flip he called “the learning process as a labyrinth of the senses and faculties” — and that he saw as already characterizing perception itself. So where Innis was prescient that “a stable society is dependent on an appreciation of a proper balance between the concepts of space and time” (‘A Plea for Time’), between the eye and the ear, he did not consider that this balance as a dynamic sensus communis might be more fundamental than linear time and the familiar environment in space — and than the identity correlate with these. He therefore did not see that it is entirely possible “to avoid the bias17 of the period in which [one] writes” and thereby to avoid “the fundamental solipsism of Western civilization”. 

In his letter to Innis, McLuhan indicated that this “learning process”, particularly in the case of language but in fact with any medium at all, “provided the key to all arts and sciences” and even to contemporary commerce and politics in what he called “the age of advertising”: 

Working concepts of “collective consciousness” in advertising agencies have in turn given salience and practical effectiveness to these “magical” notions of language.

But the modern world was caught in the strange fate that although it everywhere put this “magic” to use, it remained unconscious of it (like fish of water) and therefore remained trapped in it —  trapped in what could and should be its way out. As McLuhan put it to Innis:   

The whole tendency of modern communication whether in the press, in advertising, or in the high arts is toward participation in [such] a [magical] process (…) And this major revolution, intimately linked to technology, is one whose consequences have not begun to be studied although they have begun to be felt.

Technology itself had gone from Gutenbergian linearity to electric “allatonceness”. And now McLuhan was proposing to Innis that study of “this major revolution” be initiated on “Bloor St”, meaning in the old McMaster Building where Innis had been a student 40 years before and that now (following the McMaster move to Hamilton) housed the UT department of political economy that Innis headed.

McLuhan’s letter ends with a description of how this study might operate: 

A simultaneous focus of current and historic forms. Relevance to be given to selection of areas of study by dominant artistic and scientific modes of the particular period. Arts here used as providing criteria, techniques of observation, and bodies of recorded, achieved, experience. Points of departure but also return.

His estimation here of the potential of the “arts” echoed claims made earlier the letter:

But it was most of all the esthetic discoveries of the symbolists since Rimbaud and Mallarmé (developed in English by Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Lewis and Yeats) which have served to recreate in contemporary consciousness an awareness of the potencies of language such as the Western world has not experienced in 1800 years.

an experiment in communication which is to follow the lines of this letter in suggesting [a] means of linking a variety of specialized fields by what may be called a method of esthetic analysis of their common features.

What was at stake in these “esthetic discoveries” and in an “esthetic analysis” derived from them was the “method” of a flip back into changed presuppositions (or media)18

From the point of view of the artist however the business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience.

Experience conceived on the model of language learning — “awareness of the potencies of language” — was the continually renovating exercise of perception based on the flip back into a changed medium. Study of this “process” as implemented on the basis of different dominants would allow “a simultaneous focus of current and historic forms” AND the testing of each of these forms through “direct participation in an experience” for the intelligibility it was able to give (or not) to the great questions implicated in communication (especially that of its unavoidable “bias”).  Once “achieved”, such intelligibility would itself already represent an overcoming of “the fundamental solipsism of Western civilization” and so be a new “departure but also [a] return”.19

Communications study on this model would be a search for its own beginning and itself be knotted in time. For it would actually begin only after the sort of testing for intelligibility it was already doing came into sudden focus for a community of speakers of what would constitute a new language. It would genuinely begin only when the pieces suddenly fell into place as described by Plato in his Seventh Letter as cited above — but now, not for isolated individuals who have “found [it] and [and then have it be] lost again and again”, but for an ongoing community of researchers.

Plato’s descriptions of the necessarily dialectical process of communication in philosophy have been reported with some frequency. Here is Tolstoy:   

It was something like that which might happen to a man who, after vainly attempting, by a false plan, to build up a statue out of a confused heap of small pieces of marble, suddenly guesses at the figure they are intended to form by the shape of the largest piece; and then, on beginning to set up the statue, finds his guess confirmed by the harmonious joining in of the various pieces. (What I Believe, 1884)

And Thomas Kuhn:

Suddenly the fragments in my head sorted themselves out in a new way, and fell into place together. My jaw dropped, for all at once Aristotle seemed a very good physicist indeed, but of a sort I’d never dreamed possible. Now I could understand why he had said what he’d said, and what his authority had been. Statements that had previously seemed egregious mistakes now seemed at worst near misses within a powerful and generally successful tradition. That sort of experience — the pieces suddenly sorting themselves out and coming together in a new way — is the first general characteristic of revolutionary change that I shall be singling out after further consideration of examples. Though scientific revolutions leave much piecemeal mopping up to do, the central change cannot be experienced piecemeal, one step at a time. Instead, it involves some relatively sudden and unstructured transformation in which some part of the flux of experience sorts itself out differently and displays patterns that were not visible before. (The Road Since Structure, 2000, 16-17)

And here is McLuhan on Innis in his ‘Introduction’ to the 1964 reissue of The Bias of Communication discussing “the basic difference between classified knowledge and pattern recognition”:

It is a helpful distinction to keep in mind when reading Innis since he is above all a recognizer of patterns. Dr. Kenneth Sayre explains the matter as follows (…): Classification is a process, something which takes up one’s time, which one might do reluctantly, unwillingly, or enthusiastically, which can be done with more or less success, done very well or very poorly. Recognition, in sharp contrast, is not time-consuming. A person may spend a long while looking before recognition occurs, but when it occurs it is “instantaneous”. When recognition occurs, it is not an act which would be said to be performed either reluctantly or enthusiastically, compliantly or under protest. Moreover, the notion of recognition being unsuccessful, or having been done very poorly, seems to make no sense at all.20

Along the way of trying out “participation” in the different ‘space-time resetting’ processes of multiple media21, communications study might at some happy and necessarily sudden moment join physics, chemistry, genetics and other sciences which have been born from the same experimental procedure and which have the same basis in the social resetting “magic” of new language learning. As McLuhan suggested in his letter to Innis:

One major discovery of the symbolists which had the greatest importance for subsequent investigation was their notion of the learning process as a labyrinth of the senses and faculties whose retracing provided the key to all arts and sciences…

  1. Heidegger used this text in his 1929 laudatio for Husserl to describe Husserl’s ability to spark die Sache des Denkens in his students.
  2. Instead of “their dialectic” in this passage Innis has “the oral dialectic”. He meant something like: ‘Having significance which ultimately derives from oral dialectic, their subject matter is human action and feeling and is important in the discovery of new truth…’.
  3. See Innis and McLuhan in 1936. Innis’ experience in WW1 and his graduate work in Chicago just after the war with the then 34 year old Frank Knight had inclined him in this direction. Then, in 1935, articles in the maiden issue of The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science by Knight and by Innis’s mentor at UT, E.J. Urwick, prompted Innis to specify his suspicions.
  4. See Sirluck on Innis, Owen and Havelock and Innis and Havelock – 1930 and Beyond. Much ink has been spilled on the question of how Innis came to have an interest in communications.  The suggestion here is that he had it at least since his graduate studies in Chicago in the inchoate field of “political economy”. Havelock’s work (which was abroad at UT and particularly, of course, in the classics department where Innis had close friends) then suggested the need for a similar — but interestingly different — concern in relation to the development of Greek society leading up to Plato. As McLuhan noted, the suggestion was then close of “a shift in attention from the trade-routes of the external world to the trade routes of the mind” (‘The Later Innis’, 1953).
  5. Empire and Communications, 1950 edition, 67; 1972 edition, 56.
  6. Originally in the Journal of Economic History, December 1942, reprinted in Political Economy in the Modern State, 1946, p 34.
  7. McLuhan is citing Innis here from an essay included in The Bias of Communication, ‘Industrialism and Cultural Values’.
  8. In his first published paper in 1936 on Chesterton, McLuhan, age 25, had already noted that “history is a road that must often be reconsidered and even retraced”.
  9. See ‘the “magical” essence of communication‘ for further discussion.
  10. Letters 235.  With “imitation” here, McLuhan has Greek ‘mimesis‘ in mind.  Such “imitation” is anything but a “matching”.
  11. The Medium and the Light, 157
  12. See Through the Vanishing Point, p 103: “The Shakespearean moment (“that time of year”) includes several times at once…”.
  13. Through the Vanishing Point, 55: “If the three-dimensional illusion of depth (in Western European art) has proved to be a cul-de-sac of one time and one space, the two-dimensional (in Eastern art) features many spaces in multileveled time.” Cf, The Gutenberg Galaxy citing Georges Poulet: “For the man of the Middle Ages, then, there was not one duration only. There were durations, ranked one above another, and not only in the universality of the exterior world but within himself, in his own nature, in his own human existence” (14; also Through the Vanishing Point, 9). And Understanding Media: “plurality-of-times succeeds uniformity-of-time” (152).
  14. The ‘horizontal’ step back is just as much, according to McLuhan, a ‘vertical’ step down. Hence the importance to him of Poe’s Maelstrom and the underworlds of Odysseus, Orpheus. Aeneas and Alice. The notion of such a ‘step back’ appears as ‘der Schritt zurück’ at least as early as Schiller’s Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (1794).
  15. Similarly in his later (1972) ‘Foreword’ to Empire and Communications citing Schrödinger instead of Russell: “What Erwin Schrödinger tells us about the change of outlook from Newtonian to quantum physics concerns the student of Harold Innis: This intrusion (of quantum physics) has, in a way, overthrown what had been built on the foundations laid in the seventeenth century, mainly by Galileo, Huygens and Newton. The very foundations were shaken.
  16. It is hard to see how any sorts of discoveries (especially “scientific revolutions”) can be made without a resetting of perception and identity. But how to delineate the ‘resetting of perception and identity’ is a fateful question which has been posed without answer for at least 2500 years and probably for many millennia more than that. A great part of the problem, of course, lies in the questions of where and when this ‘takes place’, if a resetting of time and space is of its essence, and who ‘does’ it, if the experiencing subject is its result.
  17. There is no such thing for McLuhan as “the bias”. For not only are psychological and sociological contexts as complicated as chemical and genetic ones, implicating an array of different biases, but any bias is itself always situated in an ontological context which supplies a kind of counter-current to it. This underlying counter-current to bias is “the main question“.
  18. Media for McLuhan are not ‘mechanical things’. They are psychological and sociological and even ontological dominants. In his ‘Introduction’ to The Bias of Communication (1964) he wrote of the bias or distorting power of the dominant imagery and technology entailing new perception and new experience“.
  19. The great mystery to communications research is that such intelligibility has long been “achieved”, but its achievement resists communication:
    And what there is to conquer
    By strength and submission, has already been discovered
    Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
    To emulate — but there is no competition —
    There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
    And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
    That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
    For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.  (‘East Coker’, v)
  20. McLuhan cites Sayre from The Modeling of Mind (1963), 17-18.
  21. In his ‘Introduction’ to The Bias of Communication McLuhan described Innis’ method as the “use of history as a scientific laboratory, as a set of controlled conditions within which to study the life and nature of forms”.